Cephalopodcast

Flickr photo: dead horseshoe crab by Epsilon289
Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Horseshoe crabs are not really crabs at all, being more closely allied to spiders and scorpions. There are only four species in the world, but they have a fossil record dating back more than 400 million years. Their annual spawning along the east coast of the United States serves as a vital food resource for migrating birds.

At work we do a program on invertebrates for the little guys (K-2nd grade). When we hold up a horseshoe crab and ask them what it is, some invariably identify it as a stingray. When we flip the carapace over they are surprised to see the pinchers and legs. So presumably, the ray is a more familiar animal to many children. If you are a teacher interested in rectifying this matter, I encourage you to check out the many lesson plans and resources over at horseshoecrab.org.

InVERSEabrates

April is National Poetry Month and the oceans provide a lot of inspiration for verse. And one outlet for that creativity comes each year with the annual arts competition from Horseshoecrab.org.

[Horesehoecrab.org] invites students from around the world to submit poems, tales and images in appreciation and celebration of the remarkable horseshoe crab. Through the arts, our future environmental stewards have a voice which is heard globally.

The competition is open to all grade levels pre-K – 12. Students may enter through their school or can enter individually. Each year 30-50 student visual/language artworks are selected to appear in our annual anthology, “Horseshoe Crabs & the Arts.” Each of the young artists as well as their teacher receives a copy of this limited edition artist’s book. All selected works are posted on our web site in the “Poems, Tales and Images” category. In addition the works are reproduced for exhibit in our traveling art exhibition, which has been hosted in art and nature centers throughout the United States and Japan. International entrants are encouraged to help us identify art centers in their countries that may also be interested in hosting the exhibition. We welcome invitations for international display of these outstanding student works!

The competition begins each September and the deadline for entry is today. Selected artists are notified in the beginning of June.

• Horseshoecrab.org: Horseshoe Crabs & the Arts Competition
• Horseshoecrab.org: Previous competition winners (poems, art and more)
• Horseshoecrab.org: lovely anatomy of a horseshoecrab poster (34″ x 22″, $18.00 each)
• University of Delaware Sea Grant College Program: Horseshoe crabs
• PBS Nature: Crash: A Tale of Two Species. This is a video program about the horseshoe crab and the red knot. There is also an Educator’s Guide
• Windracer: Horseshoecrab Transformers
• Andrea Koupal: Anthropomorphic Horseshoecrab
• More Ocean Art Contests: Our Ocean and Coastal Ecosystems Art Competition

I’d like to introduce you to the Cephalopodcast mascot. His name is Pucker. He’s got suckers.

I am starting a new series on this blog called Pucker and Bloat. It’s named after one of the distortion filters available in Adobe Illustrator and I think it sounds pretty funny. It will feature postings based on my dawdling doodles made with this new tool. And since Illustrator is vector-based*, it should be possible for me to later animate the images in another program I want to work with, namely Flash.

Pucker and Bloat also sounds like a good name for a cartoon, don’t you think? So I am going to use that as a springboard to guide my studies. And with that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to the first character, Pucker. He might look familiar. In fact, it’s sketched from the Cephalopodcast mascot, who now officially has a name. This is not the final version. I am going to keep working on it. But in the meantime, I have to come up with a second character called Bloat. That sure sounds like the name of a blowfish to me. But what do you think? What marine creature would be friends with Pucker and have a name like Bloat?

Besides making learning fun for me and amusing for you (I hope), my other goal is to end up with a series of marine life clipart images. If this works, I’ll make them available under a Creative Commons license for use by educators.

So are any of you illustrators? Any one using Illustrator? What resources are your favorites? I am looking for tutorials and sources of inspiration. Here’s some of my favorites:

• Veerle’s blog. Veerle is a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. She makes lovely things. She also sometimes writes about science and nature (but not recently)
• Jada Fitch: I Heart Cepholopods
• David Lanham: Currently Occupied
• Kevin Cornell, Bearskin Rug: Octokid
• Aaron Blecha: Monster Squid
• Ectoplasmosis is inspiring.
• Tubbypaws: the artistic method. Cute animation that illustrates what working in Illustrator is like.
• Wanna buy me a book? Real World Adobe Illustrator CS3 by Mordy Golding, because I’ve got a lot to learn.

*Graphics programs basically come in two varieties, raster- or vector-based. Raster programs like Photoshop represent an image pixel by pixel. Because of this, they can produce painterly effects but the images are difficult to scale. Vector programs create images as a series of lines and polygons that can easily be scaled because they are fundamentally just mathematical expressions. It’s always reminded me of the wave/particle duality of physics.

Some osteological curiosities have been collecting in my cabinet inbox. It’s hard to articulate why I find these so humerus since some of them are quite gross.

• Michael Paulus: Skeletal Systems, a character study of 22 present and past cartoon cahracters
• Hyungkoo Lee: Looney Toons I and II
• Pac Man
• Bigfoot
• Grey Alien
• Hajime Emoto: Creepy

And if you want to take these things more seriously, try the teaching kits.

I came across the coastal wildlife illustrations of Patrick Lynch over on Flickr. These are taken from his current book, A Field Guide to North Atlantic Wildlife, and its companion on Southeastern and Gulf Coast marine wildlife coming out in 2008.

Lynch is a man of many talents. But it took me a moment to remember where I had seen his name before. Then I remembered he was the illustrator of my ornithology textbook.

In his 35 years with Yale University Lynch has been a medical illustrator, biomedical photographer, audiovisual producer, and for the past 20 years a designer of interactive multimedia teaching, training, and informational software and Web sites.

• Flickr: Coastal wildlife illustrations
• Flickr: Patrick J. Lynch’s photos
• A Field Guide to North Atlantic Wildlife: Marine Mammals, Seabirds, Fish, and Other Sea Life
• Creative Commons medical illustrations
• Wikipedia: Patrick J. Lynch

There is a new inky link for cephalopod enthusiasts: The Cephalopod Centerfold. It is a blog by Jessica from Massachusetts.

I live in Massachusetts. I like squids, octopus, nautiluses, cuttlefish-anything with at least eight underwater arms. Uh, drowning spiders don’t count.

Guess the last bit means that ear spiders are out of the consideration. But highlights so far include: baconopod, sink cephalopods and octopus papercraft.

[via Make]

Well, here is some ocean-going plastic that I can appreciate.

Taking art from found objects to new depths, Miwa Koizumi uses heat guns and soldering irons to sculpt startlingly realistic sea creatures from discarded liquid containers. Her PET project cleverly takes its name from PET (polyethylene terephthalate) - the highly recyclable, plant-based oil the containers are made from.

• Sculptor Miwa Koizumi has a PET project
• Koizumi PET Project
• Previously: Bad plastic

Had a birthday recently. My aunt, ever the crafty lady, gave me a nifty little gift. Instead of merely including the cash in the birthday card (note, that’s Caulerpa algae on the cover), she folded it into an origami squid for me. Thanks!

• Octopot (designed by my aunt)
• Origami with Dollar Bills (Hardback)
• Origami squid I (not my aunt’s)
• Origami squid II (not my aunt’s)
• Papercraft flying squid

(more…)

Stumbled upon the Glass Jellyfish, a photo album over at PangalacticTrading.com. They are pictures of the works of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. It reminds me a of the delicate glass rotifer sculptures at the American Museum of Natural History.

The second half of the 19th century was a time of great scientific discovery. New museums were being built throughout the world and many existing private museums were opening to the public. New galleries were designed to display the expanding array of known living plants and animals. For many groups of animals this was easily done…But what about soft bodied animals such as jellyfish and sea anemones? Examples of these animals could be pickled in spirit to preserve them, but this in no way reflected their extraordinary appearance in life. Their colours quickly faded and their shapes became distorted as the tissues shrank. Papier-mâché and wax models could not capture their translucence and transparency. Leopold Blaschka, a brilliant glassworker and amateur naturalist, devised a solution to this problem - vividly recreating these life forms modelling them in glass.

• Glass Jellyfish
• Out Of The Teeming Sea: The Life and Work of the Blaschkas
• Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka and natural history in the nineteenth century
• Blaschka on Flickr: Ine Poppe, vmuskie

This looks like it will be fun:

The flying squid is able to fly through the air to escape its enemies. The flying squid can soar at speeds of over 30 mph (50 km/hr), and sometimes fly as far as 160 feet (50 meters) at a time! The flying squid spreads the membrane between its tentacles and uses it like a wing, and uses its front fins to stabilize its body.

• 3-D Papercraft Flying Squid [PDF]