Brief Notes On Eyeball Dissections

These are some notes on the dissection of a pair of fresh eyeballs removed under field conditions from a yearling buck which died in my front yard early yesterday morning.

The first step of course, was to remove the eyeballs from the skull. The objective was to get the eyeballs out of the orbits of the skull without doing damage to the integrity of the entire eyeball. I wanted the vitreous humour, the aquous humour and the lens, capsule, iris and zonules to remain intact and undisturbed.

It was quite dark so I was working with a headlamp and a flashlight. I wanted to work quite quickly because I live within the city limits technically and cars were going by now and then. I was in no mood for the local police to come out amid flashing blue lights and so on. I figured I had about a half hour to finish the task and move the deer to a more discreet location. I was working alone, my wife and my manservant Ichabod being sound asleep and pretty well useless for this kind of thing anyway. Ichabod particularly, has for several years had an extreme aversion to blood. Otherwise he could have been quite useful and I could have hung the deer over a branch by his hindquarters, gutted the animal and slit it's throat.

But that was lower priority than the eyes. I would salvage the rest of the deer after the sun came up. I also was not partial to the notion of having a big pile of organs and guts and puddles of thickening blood in the front yard anyway. My tool were few; My hunting knife, some spoons, some small paper cups of coconut oil, and a pair of pliers. I would let the local meat packer do the rest with the buck when they opened up later in the morning.

I poured some eyewash on the first eye, followed by a bit of coconut oil. I oiled up one of the spoons, slid it under the top lid of one of the eyes, forcing the conjunctiva back with the leading edge of the spoon until I could feel it hit the optic nerve bundle. If I had had some time, I would have simply sharpened the spoon edge with a file or a sharpening stone. I could then have simply slid the sharpened edge back and forth against the nerve bundle until it was severed. Then it would be a simple matter of slicing away the various rectus and oblique muscles to release the eyes from the sockets.

Now that the spoon tip was up against the nerve bundle, quite a tough rope-like nerve cluster of about 1/8 inch diameter, I needed to slide my knife behind the spoon to get the point to the nerve cluster. It is quite resistant to being cut, even though I keep my hunting knife pretty sharp. The cluster was pierced by the knife point perhaps eight times before I could get the pliers on the bundle and tear it loose. The eye now came out of the socket very nicely. I repeated the same procedure with the second eye. One interesting feature I noticed was that, unlike the human eye, these irises were not round. They were quite oval shaped.

I immersed each eye in its' own oil bath. I then dragged the buck onto my truck and parked it back by the barn and went to bed. Which is what I am going to do now. If anyone is interested, I will include notes on the further dissection of the eyes themselves tomorrow or the next day.