Life Science Studios - Scientific Illustration

And, big thanks to Julie Johnson @lifesciencestudios.bsky.social for her help with scientific illustration! Take a look into her work, she's terrific!

6 - These results highlight host traits and cross-kingdom microbial interactions as key drivers of colony-level microbiome assembly, beautifully illustrated by @lifesciencestudios.bsky.social in the final fig. We hope this guides discussions in microbiome research to bee eco-evo and conservation.

Our manuscript on the microbiome of a stingless bee hive is out! 🦠🐝 So excited! Here’s a short thread with some findings, going from the assembly of a consistent multi-kingdom microbiome to discussions on host traits that contribute to it. Please take a look and share : ) rdcu.be/eVNFJ

With their cute little faces and fancy fins, who wouldn't have an inordinate fondness for gobies?

Anthropogenic change and the loss of behavioural diversity Abstract. Behavioural diversity is an important but understudied facet of biodiversity that enables wildlife populations to cope with rapidly changing envi

This was a challenging project because all of the initial ideas involved many crisscrossing connections or trying to use symbols. Ultimately, we settled on a layout that organized all of these connections.

Paper: Oded berger-tal, David Salz, Marcus Michelangeli, Bob Wong: tinyurl.com/kd9j3n9u

New research looks into the anthropogenic causes of behavioral diversity loss, and their consequences. I created a figure to show the pathways by which anthropogenic disturbances ultimately increase or decrease behavioral diversity.

Here are just a few of the many fish I painted this year (not to scale). It's fun to stick a bunch of them together into a collage and see some of the incredible diversity of body shape and color patterns. Merry Fishmas!

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Don't forget about your favorite #smallbusiness this holiday season!

As a bonus, if you buy manta ray stuff from my shop, the rays get a gift too! A portion of all manta ray sales will be donated to support conservation research at the Mobula Conservation Project.

www.lifesciencestudios.com/shop

Of course! Here are all of the figures I created for this paper:

A scientific figure showing speciation and explaining the concept of species delimitation, and including a quote by the paper's first author.

Check out the recent publication in Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics where the authors explore genomic species delimitation in depth. You'll see a number of #sciart figures I created to help explain some of the concepts!

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Lab logo design featuring an Atlantic salmon and European perch

New lab logo just dropped!

@michaelgbertram.bsky.social's lab studies how chemical pollution disrupts animal behavior, using Atlantic salmon and European perch in much of their research. The logo needed to showcase study organisms with an ecotoxicology twist. Enjoy your new lab logo, Bertram Lab!

Parallel shifts in differential gene expression reveal convergent miniaturization in fishes | PNAS Body size variation in vertebrates is a complex polygenic trait, tightly correlated with numerous aspects of a species’ biology, ecology, and physi...

Check out the paper at: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A page from Troyer, et al. 2022 showing that miniaturization in gobies evolved multiple times.

Gobies big and small. Not just small…. teeny tiny!

I painted 6 gobies, 3 of them not even an inch long, for this paper about the evolution of miniaturization. (To be clear, the fish are tiny, but the paintings are not.)

Big congratulations to @fishfetisher.bsky.social and colleagues.

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Yellowfin tuna get his fins painted. This fish is built for speed!

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Figure 1. Repeated convergence on miniaturization across the goby phylogeny. Maximum Likelihood Gobioidei phylogeny estimated in RaxML-NG, showing the ancestral character reconstruction for total body length. Warmer branch colors indicate smaller body sizes while cooler branchers indicate larger sizes. Branch lengths are given in molecular substitutions per site. Three clades, each containing a large-bodied (circles) and a miniature species (stars) in close phylogenetic relation, were further selected for comparative transcriptomic analyses. Node numbers correspond to Gobioidei families: 1) Odontobutidae; 2) Eleotridae; 3) Oxudercidae; and 4) Gobiidae. Illustrations (scaled to relative total length for each clade) depict the six species used in comparative analyses: Amblyeleotris guttata and Coryphopterus personatus (Clade 1), Gobiodon citrinus and Eviota atriventris (Clade 2), and Valenciennea puellaris and Trimma hollemani (Clade 3). Illustrations by Julie Johnson.

We find that miniaturization has evolved multiple times in gobies! It is especially prominent within the dwarfgobies (Eviota spp.), pygmygobies (Trimma spp.) and the infantfishes (Schindleria spp.). Shoutout to @lifesciencestudios.bsky.social for providing these beautiful goby illustrations!

I’ve got a lot of shiny torpedos heading your way!

🐟 A watercolor painting of a shark mackerel fish, a paintbrush next to the painting.

Who is on my desk today? A shark mackerel!

This shiny #fish lives off the north coast of Australia. Unlike his living counterparts, who are busy in the ocean eating little fish, this guy will help scientists communicate their research by adorning scientific figures. Which is also an important job.

A closeup of a poster showing acceptable ways to release a large manta ray or devil ray from the deck of a fishing boat.

These posters now hang on tuna fishing boats around the world in an effort to help reduce manta ray and devil ray mortality.

A closeup of a portion of a poster that shows information about different manta ray and devil ray species.

I worked with the Mobula Conservation Project to create posters in multiple languages that would show the different species, their distribution, why it is important to protect them, and proper handling and release techniques.

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This poster shows watercolor paintings of manta and devil ray species, distribution map, and graphics showing how to and how not to release rays.

What do you mean, as big as a car!?

Manta rays and devil rays are caught as bycatch in tuna fisheries, and releasing them back into the ocean is like trying to lift a car off the deck of a boat. How can this be done to maximize the likelihood that the manta ray survives the ordeal?

🧪 #conservation

Watercolor painting of a guppy

Incorporating both the illustrated conceptual images or diagrams alongside data can be really effective for guiding a reader through the key information.

Plus... guppies are pretty cute and why not include a few to adorablify your data.

(Figure created for Walsman et al., 2022)

The figure also needed to include a map with the data types and locations that informed their model.

I created this figure in the thick of the pandemic when social distancing was on everybody's mind. Here, I had the chance consider social distancing and disease (or parasites) in other organisms.

An illustrated figure from Walsman, et al. 2022 in Nature Ecology & Evolution

Gathering guppies! 🐟 🐟 🐟

The figures I create often include a mix of illustrated conceptual elements with data. This figure needed to show how guppy shoaling behavior upstream (no predators) and downstream (predators) differed, and how those differences lead to parasite transmission.
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I certainly think so 😊. I feel lucky I get to do this everyday.

Thank you!

Such a good book, especially as someone whose family members and friends have had organ transplants, amputations, knee replacements, cataract surgeries, and facial bone surgeries. As far as I know, no butt lifts among my acquaintances… probably.

Just finished @maryroach.bsky.social new book Replaceable You and the Epilogue really got to me. Our loved one got a kidney transplant two weeks ago, and it’s awful to think of all the life saving research that has been halted by the current administration’s NIH and science funding cuts. 💔

I thought it might be fun to show you a little behind the scenes of creating a fish scientific illustration from sketch to painting to publication.

🐟 🐡 #evolutionarybiology #thereisnofrogfishemoji

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When creating fish illustrations, it is very important to have a sleeping cat on your desk. Across the middle of the desk is the ideal positioning.