Deadliest Catch
Posted: April 16, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: coquille, digital, science 1 Comment »This morning, I was contacted by a PhD student at William and Mary who is studying diamondback terrapins (a type of turtle that lives in salt marshes) and expressed interest in using some of my illustrations in a pamphlet for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. Diamondback terrapins, which thrive in brackish water, live in the coastal marshes of many states on the Atlantic Coast (at least Georgia through New Jersey, and perhaps their range is bigger than that). They are currently threatened by crab fishing in many of these places where it is legal for coastal homeowners to do a small amount of crab fishing from their property. Since crabs are similar in size to terrapins, the pots used to trap craps often trap terrapins as bycatch. Since terrapins, unlike crabs, cannot breathe underwater, they drown if the pot is left underwater too long.
The solution is a device called a TED (Terrapin Excluder Device, Turtle Excluder Device, or BRD: Bycatch Reduction Device, depending on who you ask). It is a rectangle made out of plastic or metal wire, which is installed in the opening of a crab pot. Theoretically, it is wide enough to allow a crab to pass through, but too narrow for a terrapin. Thus, it saves terrapins.
My favorite project, while working at the National Aquarium as an intern last fall, was creating a brochure panel which demonstrated the installation of a TED. It is intended to teach coastal residents how they can save some turtles, and eat some crabs, too. It can now be found on the website of the Maryland DNR and the illustrations will soon be part of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission’s poster on terrapins. Just glad I can help save some turtles!
Here’s that brochure panel, and some of my other nearly-forgotten work:
Free Showing of Split Estate
Posted: April 13, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: environment Leave a comment »Split Estate is an interesting documentary about the consequences of hydrofracking (a new technology developed for natural gas extraction) in the western U.S., but it applies to the current situation in NEPA as well.
Come see it for FREE at the Montrose Theatre this Thursday (the 15th) at 6:30 pm.
18 Public Ave., Montrose, PA.
*I did not design the entire poster
Graduation Announcement
Posted: April 10, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: digital 1 Comment »My good friend/ex-housemate Meghan, of Chronicles of an Almost Graduate, will soon be a graduate! I’ve designed her graduation announcement around a photo taken by Mark Hoffman:
Congrats, Meghan!
Inspiration
Posted: April 8, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: inspiration Leave a comment »
Today I visited the American Visionary Art Museum just across the harbor from the Aquarium in Baltimore. It absolutely blew my mind. Here are some of the highlights:
Post Secret is an ongoing art project in which people send in anonymous postcards with secrets on them. The really juicy ones are hung in museums, included in a book, and posted on www.postsecret.blogspot.com. I got as far as the first staircase, where the postcards were hung, before security took my camera away from me 
Renaldo Kuhler is a scientific illustrator for the North Carolina State Museum. With his spare time and thoughts, he has invented an entire imaginary nation, complete with religion, language, and six decades worth of history. You can see the nation in hundreds (maybe thousands) of beautiful color illustrations. My favorite (so far) is his illustration of the Rocaterranian sewage treatment plant.
Vincent Nardone has been in prison for most of his life, but that hasn’t stopped him from making giant stipple drawings of the world he remembers. The most amazing thing is that all of the scenes in his artwork are from the 1950′s, using nothing but his photographic memory as a reference. Unreal. (I can’t find a good photo of one of his works, but my favorite was a scene of an entire drive-through movie theater… can you imagine remembering EXACTLY what each of those 1950′s cars looks like?)
And those are just the names that I can remember. The rest of the show included beautiful drawings sent as thank-yous to his lawyers by a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, actual Afghani rugs in which butterfly and flower patterns were replaced by helicopters and tanks, and a mini art museum created by a man who had re-painted every one of his favorite classical paintings (by the thousands) onto boards roughly the size of business cards.
If you’re ever in Baltimore, check out the American Visionary Art Museum.
Shark Feeding Day
Posted: April 7, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Baltimore, science, travel 1 Comment »Yesterday, my awesome housemate/landlady Wendy took me to work with her at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, where she generously supplied me with a desk for the day. I was lucky to be visiting on shark feeding day, which happens once per week, and Wendy invited me to come with her when she talked to the public about the shark feeding.
Shark feeding is much more interesting and complicated than I ever imagined! The sharks are located in a tank shaped like a giant “o”, with a large space in the center where the public stands. Above the tank (about 6″ from the surface of the water), and invisible to the public, is the shark catwalk, a skinny platform where aquarium staff stand as they feed the sharks. First, gates were dropped down in various parts of the “o”, dividing up the different shark species (apparently this part takes some serious effort and strategy on the part of whoever is dropping the gates) into 3 or 4 different groups.
Next, the sawfish (my favorite), were fed. Sawfish look like sharks, but they have long snouts that resemble chainsaws. Each side of their snouts has a line of sharp, pointy scales modified to look like teeth. The “teeth”, if completely broken off, never grow back. They use their dangerous snouts by waving them back and forth while swimming through schools of fish, injuring their prey. Then, they swim over the injured fish, gobbling them up with their stingray-like mouths.
Apparently The Aquarium’s sawfish are picky eaters, because I watched as a dead fish impaled onto the end of a stick chased around an uninterested sawfish. The whole scene was reminiscent of my childhood – watching a fork come toward my mouth as I heard one of my parents say “here comes the airplane….” Wendy tells me that the sawfish are very picky (spoiled!) about the fish species that they eat. Therefore, the aquarium staff often hides a more nutritious species of fish inside a tastier fish, to make sure that the sawfish get all of the nutrients that they need.
I asked Wendy where the fish that the sharks are fed come from, and got an unexpected answer. Apparently, every week, one of the shark staff goes to the local fish market, where he hand-picks fish for each shark. Every shark has a number, and each fish is prepared (with vitamins added, etc) exactly for that individual. When a shark eats a fish, both the shark and the fish that he ate are meticulously recorded.
I was surprised to notice how poor the aim of a hungry shark can be. I watched as sand tiger sharks ferociously snapped at fish on poles, and missed several times before they caught the fish. According to Wendy, they close their eyes when they get ready to eat, and rely on their other senses for aim. At the aquarium, the prongs holding the fish carry a slight electric current, which the sharks can sense and use to aim for their “prey”.
The Smithsonian
Posted: April 6, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: science, travel, Washington D.C. Leave a comment »Yesterday, with the excuse of needing fish specimens for my Freshwater Fish of the Talamanca project, I had the opportunity to venture into the Smithsonian’s museum support center in Suitland, MD, where they stash many of the specimens and artifacts that they do not have space for at the museum in Washington, D.C.
I was greeted at the door by a great guy named Jerry Finan, with whom I share a last name, despite never having met him before. The Smithsonian had been generous to give me a nice little office for the day, complete with microscope, implements for handling specimens, and some rolling chairs. Jerry was happy to show around the collections, where we gathered the 14 or so specimens that I needed on a rolling metal cart. I was hoping that the collections would look like the warehouse in the opening scene of the most recent Indiana Jones movie, with giant crates stacked floor to ceiling. Perhaps that’s what the anthropology archives look like, but the vertebrate zoology department looks more like a cross between the Department of Mysteries and a library. Upon entering the storage pod (yes, they’re called pods, according to the map in the lobby), you find yourself standing in a long, dim, hallway, surrounded by various clicks, drips, and buzzing. The hallway has 6 or 7 doors, each one leading to an enormous room filled with shelves containing jars of every fish species that I have ever heard of, and apparently over half a million gallons of ethanol.
As if that wasn’t exciting enough, Jerry took me down to the area where the large specimens are kept. I had never thought about how sharks, stingrays, and other big animals are preserved and stored, but apparently it is in rectangular metal tanks ranging from the size of a washing machine to the size of a very tall bathtub. This is were we searched for Centropomus unidecimalis, a rather large specimen of sportfish. Jerry donned shoulder-length black gloves, and rooted around in the ethanol-filled tank until he found the specimen that I needed, marked with a tag. He was incredibly patient in answering all of my questions (“what are those pipes for?”* “do you have a giant squid?”**, etc.) He asked me if there was anything else that I wanted to see, so I asked to see their coelacanth. He opened up one of the bathtub-sized tanks, and there it was, the same size as me! He also showed me a tank containing rays, some mysterious fleshy bits, and some shark parts (apparently with animals too large to put in a tank, they cut them up, then put them in a tank).
As if the day wasn’t exciting enough, that afternoon I took the metro into D.C. to see fellow illustrator Zel Stoltzfus, currently under contract at the Smithsonian Museum! A perfect end to a perfect day.
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*he didn’t know
**yes, they have one on display in the museum, which I saw later that day with Zel!
Artist vs. Printer
Posted: April 3, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment »When I finished up graduate school nearly a year ago and began taking jobs as an illustrator, I expected to do a little traveling. Baltimore, Ithaca, Costa Rica… but I never expected to venture into printer repair.
I have two Canon Pixma MX700s (well, one is mine, the other is my father’s). In a joint attempt to “stick it to the man”, we installed identical continuous ink flow systems, effectively voiding the warranties of both printers. Now, about a year and a half later, both printers have crapped out simultaneously, spitting out the same error code.
Now, as an artist, I desperately need a printer. I also do not have a lot of money to purchase new printers willy-nilly. Finally, the idea of throwing away a perfectly good piece of equipment when the problem might be as trivial as a fingerprint on a sensor just irks me. (Paying Canon $150 to tell me there was a fingerprint on a sensor also irks me).
So, I coughed up $15, and bought the MX700 service manual from semi-sketchy e-manual.com. I also consulted the forums of fixyourownprinter.com, where I learned that the error code being spit out by both printers was mainly the result of a little windshield wiper-like device getting stuck in some dried ink, easily accessible without disassembling anything. 8 hours (and one dissected printer) later, one printer is working like new and the other is well on it’s way to recovery (and would probably be further on the path to recovery had a hacksaw not been involved). Thank you, fixyourownprinter.com, you may have saved me $400.
You probably won't have to do this.
