Frog Muscle Essay

The gastrocnemius was exposed on the leg of the bullfrog that was removed at the hip joint through careful dissection of the muscle away from the tibo-fibula bone while leaving the it attached to the knee and heel. The muscle was consistently moistened by Ringer’s solution throughout the entire experiment. The Achilles tendon was removed at the heel of the frog. The tibiofibular bone was cut below the knee and the femur below the knee (Frog Skeletal Muscle Experiement). The baseline value of the force transducer was set to zero. This zeroing procedure was conducted at the start of each exercise. The force transducer was then calibrated for the exercises. The muscle was fixed onto the muscle holder with a thread attached to the Achilles tendon and it was stringed through the tab on the force transducer and the stimulating electrodes were in constant contact with the muscle.A supramaximal stimulus voltage was determined examining twitch recruitment. By starting at a stimulus of 0.700 V, the voltage was steadily increased by 0.500 increments until three successive stimuli were observed in which there was no further increase in the amplitude of the muscle contraction (Frog Skeletal Muscle Experiment). This value was used for the following exercises as the baseline stimulus voltage in order to ensure maximal contraction for every
The software delivered the first supramaximal stimulus upon initiation and second stimulus after the specified time interval (Frog Skeletal Muscle Experiment). Subsequent trials were conducted at the following stimulus intervals: 200 ms, 100ms, 80 ms, 60 ms, 40 ms, and 20 ms (Frog Skeletal Muscle Experiment). Observations about how the muscle reacted as the stimulus interval was decreased were taken throughout the