Planet Tuna

Lluis, Hannah and Patricia prepare to film a hand-drawn video.

Three years ago I was contacted by Patricia Reglero, a researcher at the local Oceanographic Institute who works with tuna and other large pelagic predators. The sea just south of Mallorca is an important breeding area for Atlantic Bluefin tuna and much of her research has to do with how, where, when and at what temperature these giant tuna spawn. Patricia was bothered that the work she and her colleagues were doing wasn’t reaching the general public, so she asked me, fellow illustrator Flavia Gargiulo, and journalist Maria Lopez whether we’d be interested in brainstorming the best way to combine words and images in order to explain ocean science to a broad audience. The result of much thinking and experimenting is planettuna.com, a web site with articles, videos, species fact sheets, and more. It’s available in English, Spanish, and Catalan. Two more people have joined the team since we started up, Anna Aguiló as our social media guru, and Lluis Fernández who films and edits our videos. The background illustrations such as the opening underwater lab scene and many of the article illustrations (for example the Bluefin Tuna fact sheet) are by Flavia Gargiulo, who is a terrific mix of great illustrator and savvy designer. Others (for instance the illustrations — and the text in this case — of the evolution article are mine: http://planettuna.com/en/our-tuna-relatives-the-evolution-of-vertebrates-including-ourselves-and-tunas/

Planet Tuna has allowed me to dive into something new to me: making videos. I love the way videos allow me to tell a story, and two I’m particularly fond of are the one in which I describe how we’re related to tuna, and a very recent one about ocean bacteria. Oh how I love the ocean microbiome!

Enjoy! We add material to the site on a regular basis, so check back in from time to time, and sign up for the social media if so inclined.

Recreating the deep past of Planet Earth

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What you might see were you to time travel and land on Earth three billion years ago. The colors are produced by bacteria like those we find in Yellowstone today.

Over the course of 2017 I worked on a very cool project for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Geology Museum. Scientists at UW-Madison are studying the first several billion years of the planet’s existence and trying to figure out how much of our planet’s surface was covered in oceans, and how much was above water in the form of continents and islands. They are looking at chemical signatures in very ancient sedimentary rocks that formed underwater. These chemical signatures give them some idea of how much continental rock was weathering away at the time and ending up as minerals in the sea.

 

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From left to right, the planet 4, 3 and 2 billion years ago.

UW-Madison Geology Museum’s assistant director Brooke Norsted contacted me to know if I’d be interested in illustrating some outreach materials based on this research. The goal was to have materials that Brooke could show visitors to the Museum that would help them grasp what Earth might have been like in its infancy and adolescence, between two and four billion years ago.

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Four billions years ago. Scientists think that a haze of hydrocarbons would have made the atmosphere reddish. Landmasses were small and of volcanic origin.

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Two billion years ago. Photosynthetic cyanobacteria are busy adding oxygen to the atmosphere.

We started with a video conference with Brooke and with researchers Aaron Satkoski and Clark Johnson. The ideas that emerged were: to do three landscapes representing 2, 3, and 4 billion years ago respectively, three globes showing the continents and oceans in those same timeframes, and the field notes of a pair of imaginary scientists who explore these ancient worlds with the help of a time machine. As I worked on the images and the globes I consulted on a regular basis with Dr. Satkoski. These reconstructions are quite unique, and entirely based on current research. This made the project exciting; I had no previous reconstructions to go by, but instead had to follow Aaron’s directions as to how intense the sunlight was at each point in time, what color the sky might have been, what the fossil record tells us about the presence of cyanobacteria, and so on.

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I had met museum director Rich Slaughter and assistant director Brooke Norsted over ten years ago during a conference of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. Rich and Brooke took a group of us illustrators on a field trip to hunt for Ordovician fossils in a huge rock pile not far from Madison. (The ones I collected have lived in a shoe box in my studio ever since). Years later I contacted Rich Slaughter for help illustrating the Tully Monster (is it a mollusk? Is it a chordate? It’s superweird!) for When Fish Got Feet, the three-in-one version of my “When” books. It just goes to show that you never know when a contact will re-emerge: soon after that Brooke contacted me about doing this wonderful project.

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The Ordovician invertebrate fossils I collected with the help of Rich and Brooke.

How life changed the planet, and how the planet changed life: an exhibit in process

EarthLifelogoLR I’m currently working on artwork for an exhibit about the interrelated evolution of Life and the Planet. The scientists I’m working for are paleobotanists/paleoecologists Cindy Looy and Ivo Duijnstee at UC Berkeley.  I spent two months with them this Spring getting the project started. I will now finish the illustrations in my studio in Palma. Both the title and the logo of the exhibit are provisional, by the way, and may change.

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With Cindy Looy and Ivo Duijnstee, in front of a scale mock-up of one of the scenes.

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Free Download: Dedication Labels

Click the on the image for an 8 1/2 x 11″ sheet with a variety of labels that you can print, cut out, and paste into your books. You can use them as ex libris, or as dedication labels if you’re giving one of my books to someone as a gift. In that case, just add the name of your favorite child and you’re all set.  Happy Holidays!

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Evolve or Perish: The Board Game

Evolve or Perish is a board game – not from the makers of Monopoly, but from ETE, the Evolution of the Terrestrial Ecosystems Program, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Paleontologists Cindy Looy and Ivo Duijnstee asked me to work with them to create it. We had collaborated before – Cindy was a paleobotanical consultant for When Fish Got Feet and When Dinos Dawned. Read more