Galvin's frog leg observations

[reese's]

HELP I have been trying to duplicate the twitching of frog legs when introduced to an electrical current but have had no success. I first used a "preserved" frog but determined the "stiffness" of the speciman prohinited any reaction. I am now using "fresh" frog legs. I have tried variable voltages from 1.5 to 42v DC. I have connected the electrical leads directly to the legs, to stick pins and inserted them into the tissue,to a metal plate and laid the legs on top of that and other variations but no movement whatsoever. I need specific information on how to set up this visual to illustrate my hypothesis.

[raytrent]

I haven't had much luck finding any experimental procedures for this effect, I'm afraid. You can search for Galvani's original experiment on the web and find a few pictures, but there aren't many details.

My intuition says that the frog legs would have to be pretty fresh for this to work (as in: not dead for very long), but I admit I don't really know. It would be an interesting experiment to find out how long after death the legs could be made to twitch.

[edneu3]

I had a bit of better luck searching the web for info on this topic. Go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Galvani.

Here you'll see there are 2 important factors I think you might be missing.
1) Galvani's assistant touched and exposed nerve in the frog's leg ( I don't know how to identify that. I never studied frog leg anatomy.)
2) The leg jumped when a SPARK touched the nerve - not just DC current.

These are probably key factors in your experiment.

Here's another web link that provides a bit more info: http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Galvani- ... nts/166242

I hope this helps.

Ed Neu
Buffalo, MN