ILLUSTRATIONS

Biology field work implies the use a field notebook. If you mix this notes with your travel experiences you will end up with an invaluable treasure for the future, when you face writing a report or just remembering the past. My daughter Elena convinced me to extract some of the innocent and rapid sketches I make while I write, and here is a collection taking from several of my travel notebooks. But if you are intrigued by how such field books look like, I have fully scanned that of a collecting trip to French Polinesia in 2005 (open pdf).

In 2010 I finished a detailed morphological study of one of my Laparocerus, namely L. undatus Woll., 1864 which is one of the largest. Here I present the plates of that work (click to open) organised in landscape format, and ready to consult. The names of the different parts of the body and internal pieces are in Spanish, and that is done on purpose, as anatomical literature is mostly available only in English. If you would like to access the original publication, please click here.

When I promoted the Law of Symbols of Nature for the Canary Islands, I contacted with Eric C. Cichosz, a great muralist, who prepared these compositions for each islands’ selected species. The animal is somehow protecting the plant species, and he introduced also elements from each island’s landscape. He did a smart job.

I prepared this set of symbols to be used as little icons to tag species according to main marine biological unformal  groups within REDMIC (Integrated Repository of Marine Data from the Canary Islands). Here is the complete set, including some redundant symbols.

Modern digital photography has acquired such capacities that many biologist have switched to it, leaving aside the tradition of drawing, which has been common practice in descriptive zoology or botany. However, I believe that there is still room for scientific illustrations for its simplicity and abstraction capacity. In any case, I enjoy drawing in the old ways, with a pencil or with China ink, much patience, and listening jazz or the Brandenburg Concerts of Bach.