Parasitoid Wasp, Blue Velvet Worm and Glowworm Caves of Waitomo

 

Long-tailed Ichneumoid Wasp, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

Next up for #InsertAnInvert2023 is my hand-printed lino block print on 8" x 8" Japanese washi paper of Megarhyssa macrurus, the long-tailed ichneumoid wasp or ichneumon wasp. It's a parasitoid wasp and its "long-tail" is in fact it's extremely long ovipositor which you can see looping from its back end into the tree. The wasp uses it to deposit an egg into a tunnel in dead wood bored by its host, the larva of a similarly large species of horntail or wood wasp. Its body is up to 51 mm long and the ovipositor on the female wasps can be 130 mm. It can be found in the eastern US and southern Canada around the Great Lakes. 

Blue Velvet Worm, linocut 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

 

July is Subterranean month, which as it turns out, requires some new art. Here's a sneak peek! I stuck fairly close to the first prompt, simply choosing a different velvet worm, than the one suggested, because the colour is so gorgeous. Hence, my Blue Velvet Worm. Velvet worms (phylum: Onychophora) are named for their velvet-like texture and somewhat wormlike appearance. They are elongate, soft-bodied, many-legged nocturnal animals who spit slime to trap prey, somewhere between worms and arthropods. Like an arthropod their heads have segments but otherwise they have wormlike bodies. They have flexible wormlike skin but like insect skeleton in composition. They have insect-like limbs, but they are unjointed and conical in shape. They look like caterpillars who don't become butterflies. The two extant families of velvet worms are Peripatidae and Peripatopsidae. And amongst the latter there are some in the genus Peripatoides which exhibits lecithotrophic ovoviviparity; that is, mothers in this genus produce and retain yolky eggs in their uteri. The eggs are fertilized internally, and babies develop inside their mother until large enough to be born, in batches of 4–6, as colourless miniatures of the parents! Peripatoides novaezealandiae is a species complex of velvet worms in the genus Peripatoides, found throughout New Zealand. This print is made based on photos of P. aurorbis, but all the Peripatoides novaezealandiae have no morphological characters that distinguish them.

 

Glowworm Caves, linocut in regular and glow-in-the-dark ink, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

Glowworm Caves, linocut in regular and glow-in-the-dark ink, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024, shot in the dark so you can see how it glows.

 

Third week was troglofauna, or invertebrates who live in caves.  I strayed from the suggested species, because I wanted to illustrate invertebrates I travelled to see, in the glowworm caves of Waitomo. My love of bioluminescence overcame my claustrophobia, and I was proud I ventured into caves, even where it was a tight squeeze.

Glowworm cave photo by by Rap, Raft 'n' Rock, Waitomo

That's me, photo
by Rap, Raft 'n' Rock, Waitomo, May 2010

On the North Island of New Zealand or Aotearoa, there are caves near Waitomo with large populations of Arachnocampa luminosa, a glowworm (insect larvae and adult larviform females that glow through bioluminescence) native to the country.

In the limestone caves, these glowworms, a species of fungus gnat endemic to New Zealand, dot the ceilings with glowing light like blue constellations in the night sky. The larval stage and the imago produce a blue-green bioluminescence. They are found in caves and sheltered banks where humidity is high, hence its Māori name "titiwai", meaning "projected over water." They lay eggs on cave walls and the glowing 3 to 5 mm larva emerge, generally in the spring, and select a site to begin producing its silk nest where it will grow to 30 to 40 mm over several months.

The larva spins silk nests on cave ceilings from where they hang up to 30 threads along which it regularly places small sticky droplets to trap prey like other small Diptera (especially midges), spiders and other non-flying invertebrates. Prey is attracted by the bioluminescence and then sticks to the threads. When prey gets stuck, the larva pulls it up by ingesting the snare and starts feeding on the prey alive.

These are a limited edition reduction lino block print. Each is made with glow in the dark ink, so the 8" x 8" prints themselves glow like the glowworms.

 

Humpback and Barnacle

 

Humpback and Barnacle, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

This month is parasite month for #InsertAnInvert2024, so I have been kind of dancing around the prompts and choosing somewhat different species than those suggested, cause, to be quite honest, some of these inverts give me the creeps. For the first two prompts I chose plant rather than animal parasites and reposted art I had previously made: the Dropsophila (fruit fly) and carmine prints. For the third week a shark barnacle was a suggested species, but I decided to look at the whale barnacles.

This hand-printed lino block print with gel plate printed areas is about Coronula diadema, a barnacle which specializes in humpback and some other baleen whales. Each print is 20.3 cm x 20.3 cm (8" x 8") on lovely Japanese mulberry paper and shows the humpback whale swimming above and a close up of the whale below with six barnacles.

The Coronula diadema name comes from its barrel and crown-like shape, which can grow to 5 cm (2") tall and 6 cm (2.4") in diameter. They are common to abundant on humpback whales. Barnacles are actually crustaceans, and C. diadema has 6 plates and a hexagonal opening on top, protected with a pair of opercular valves. The hermaphrodite parasites cluster together in order to breed. The barnacles use the whales as host, and the whales may in turn use the barnacles as a sort of armour and to inflict more damage when fighting in mating battles or against predators. So theirs is a likely a mutually beneficial relationship and are considered commensals.

Joseph Fourier and the Sinusoids

Joseph Fourier, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2024

Sometimes people ask to commission a scientist portrait of someone I had already considered portraying. I don't think you can study physics for as long as I did and not think about Joseph Fourier. So when asked to make his portrait, I had a plan in mind.

French mathematician and physicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) is best remembered for his work Fourier series, Fourier transforms, Fourier’s law of conduction, Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis and their use to solve heat transfer problems. He is also often credited with proposing the greenhouse effect as early as 1824.

Born in Auxerre, a son of a tailor, he was orphaned at age nine. Recommended to the Bishop of Auxerre, he was educated by the Benedictine Order of the Convent of St. Mark. Being a commoner he could not seek a commission in the scientific corps of the army but took a military lectureship in mathematics. He took a prominent part in promoting the French Revolution in his district. Nonetheless he was briefly imprisoned by the Terror. In 1795 he was appointed to the École Normale and later succeeded Lagrange at the École Polytechnique. After accompanying Napoleon as a scientific adviser on his Egyptian expedition in 1798 he was appointed secretary of the Institut d’Egypte, where he organized workshops for the French to make munitions, wrote several papers for the Egyptian Institute (now Cairo Institute). He returned to France in 1801 after the British victories, to resume work at the École Polytechnique but Napoleon appointed him Prefect of the Department of Isère in Grenoble. In Grenoble he began to experiment on the propagation of heat, and contributed to the comprehensive catalogue Description de l’Égype.

In 1820 he published his theorem on polynomial real roots, that a polynomial with real coefficients has a real root between any two consecutive zeros of its derivative. (This is technically a corollary of a theorem published by Budan in 1807 and 1811, also now known as Fourier’s theorem). In 1822 he succeeded Delambre as Permanent Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, and he published his heat flow research in his Théorie analytique de la chaleur (The Analytical Theory of Heat) which included his important claim that any function of a variable, continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable. The idea is true (with some conditions, later discovered by Dirichlet) and a breakthrough. This is the foundation for what we call the Fourier transform, an invaluable tool in math, physics and engineering. During the 1820s he realized that the Earth, at its distance from the Sun should be colder is it is only heated by solar radiation. He wrongly thought Earth has must then receive significant radiation from interstellar space but he did consider the correct answer that the atmosphere acts as an insulator. He referred to experiments by Saussure who measured temperature in a vase with several inset panes of glass, who noted that the inner chambers (under more glass) become hotter. Fourier noted that if the atmosphere makes a layer like the glass in the vase we would get the same effect on Earth (though he noted that Saussure’s experiment did not account for the convection we get in the atmosphere). This is now recognized as the first conception of what we know as the greenhouse effect.

He became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in 1830. He experienced heart aneurysms in both Egypt and Grenoble and died 16 May 1830. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetary in Paris in a tomb with an Egyptian motif and his name is one of 72 inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.

My portrait (inspired by the portrait by Boilly) alludes to Fourier decomposition: the sine waves sum to the violet waveform framing him. With an infinite series of sines, his very outline, as a function of x (the horizontal axis across the page) could be made. Likewise the circles in the background are another visualization of building up an image of Fourier himself from sine waves. If you trace the perimeter of a circle on a continuously advancing sheet of paper you produce a sine wave. (Mathematicians and physicists often use this equivalency to think of a real sinusoid as the real part of a complex function where a vector formed by by its real and imaginary parts traces a circle around the origin). So a simplified function tracing the main lines in Bouilly’s portrait can be produced by the sum of sine waves produced by tracing the series of these epicycle circles. 

There are a lot of great tutorials about this online, but a particular shout out to 3Blue1Brown on YouTube who not only has an excellent series of videos (it's everything you ever wanted to know about Fourier series but were afraid to ask) but he's also specifically made animations of producing a path that approximates Bouilly's portrait with rotating vectors or Fourier epicycles here.

Crustaceans!

 May is crustacean month for #InsertAnInvert2024. Playing on the idea of carcinisation, the process by which again and again, other crustaceans keep evolving crab-like bodies, the prompts are "crab," "false crab," "not crab" - and, shudder, "really not crab." Some of the non-crab crustacean abominations are, well, in my subjective opinion, nightmare fuel, so I veered off the path of suggested species and found a cute but distinctly non-crab crustacean for you. Also, it was a cue to try different print media. 

First up is "true crab" and I had my frog crab ready, from the warm colour prompt for Printer Solstice.

Frog crab, linocut, 8" x 8" Ele Willoughby, 2024

Next up was false crab, so I re-shared my porcelain crab.

Porcelain crab linocut, 8" x 10", Ele Willoughby, 2021

Then was "not a crab" - I cheated a bit by sharing another false crab: the yeti crab. It has crab in its name but it's really closer to a squat lobster.

Yeti crab linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2020

 

The last prompt is "really not a crab" with some suggestions that I honestly did not feel like contemplating at length. There are some scary looking crustaceans out there!

Daphina longispina, Tetrapak drypoint, 4" x 6" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

Instead, I went for the adorable microscope (1 to 5 mm) planktonic crustacean Daphina or water flea! Daphina longispina is a wee little freshwater water flea found worldwide in bodies of water from the size of rock pools to large lakes. They are filter feeders who mainly eat algae. This one is a female full of green eggs. I made this print using an actual Tetrapak juice container. I etched in the fine lines and peeled a bit of the surface material for coloured areas, then pushed ink into the etched areas with some card, and wiped away the excess ink. I cut my plate in a circle to suggest that this is a view through a microscope. I was able to pull a few prints on dampened watercolour paper using my etching press.

Turtles, all the way down for World Turtle Day

 

Turtles, all the way down, world, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024

Today is World Turtle Day, a day to celebrate and protect turtles and their habitats worldwide. Years ago I made a print called ‘Turtles, all the way down’ for an art show about cosmology, where the expression is used as a metaphor for infinity regress. This echos origin myths that the Earth is supported on the back of the World Turtle. Though ostensibly about astrophysics, I took the opportunity to depict many species of turtles to celebrate their biodiversity.

This year I was commissioned by Turtle Survival Alliance, to illustrated this expression again, with a variety of wonderful but sadly endangered turtle species of special focus, in two prints: one for turtles from around the world, and one for North American species. Turtle Survival Alliance works to prevent extinctions of these amazing and varied animals worldwide, so I am very glad to make art for this cause!

My newly completed prints are on their way to Turtle Survival Alliance who will be auctioning them, as well as selling signed, limited edition, signed and numbered archival printed posters of each to raise funds for turtle conservation, later this summer.

The worldwide selection of turtles, from top to bottom are:
1 - Vallarta Mud Turtle (Kinosternon vogti), from Mexico
2 - Pancake Tortoise (Malacochersus tornieri), from Africa
3 - Indochinese Box Turtle (Cuora galbinifrons), from Asia
4 - Radiated Tortoise (Astrochelys radiata), from Madagascar
5 - Burmese Roofed Turtle (Batagur trivittata), from Myanmar
6 - Asian Giant Tortoise (Manouria emys phayrei), from Bangladesh

Turtles, all the way, North America, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024

Turtles from North America are:
1 - Bog Turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii)
2 - Spotted Turtle (Clemmys guttata)
3 - Eastern Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina)
4 - Diamondback Terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin)
5 - Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta)
6 - Alligator Snapping Turtle (Macrochelys temminckii)

 

My original Turtles, all the way down:

 

Turtles, All the Way Down, 11" x 14" (27.9 cm x 35.6 cm)
linocut with chine-collé by Ele Willoughby, 2016

The turtles in my original print are from the top we have an eastern mud turtle (Kinosternon subrubrum), a red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans), a black pond turtle (Geoclemys hamiltonii), a painted batagur (Batagur borneoensis), a Oaxaca mud turtle (Kinosternon oaxacae), a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) and the hint of something larger.

Worms!

April is worm month for #InsertAnInvert2024 and I confess, worms are not my favourite invertebrates. But, I have been making some science art about the worms, especially some flamboyant marine worms. For the prompts long no limbs, long with limbs, not long no limbs and not long no limbs, I made a six-lined ribbon worm, Y, a fuchsia flat worm and an Elvis worm.

 

Six-lined Ribbon Worm, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

 

The suggested species for the "long, no limbs" theme was Tubalanus sexlineatus. The six-lined ribbon worm (Tubulanus sexlineatus) is dark brown with five narrow, (sometimes discontinuous) longitudinal, white stripes, with indications of a sixth stripe midventrally and encircled in up to 150 white bands. Tubulanus is a genus of primitive nemertean worms in the order Palaeonemertea. It lives on the Pacific coast of North America from Alaska to California. Amazingly this is a species which can  to regrow a head after amputation!

What’s inside this cigar box? A black smoker - with giant tube worms (Riftia pachyptila) for #InsertAnInvert2024. I’ve had the idea for this multimedia in my head for years! Cigar box, collaged papers, gouache, Posca pen, glue, washi tape.

I’ve never had the opportunity to go on a research cruise to a hydrothermal vent, though I have contributed to plans for monitoring and seen a lot of footage shot by marine geophysicist/geologist/geochemist colleagues. I used to walk by the top of a chimney daily at work at PGC; it had been recovered by an ROV (something scientists no longer do, as these vents are protected).

Black Smoker multimedia: Cigar box, collaged papers, gouache, Posca pen, glue, washi tape. Ele Willoughby, 2024

They are extraordinary, otherworldly environments and it tells us a lot about life that such vents, called black smokers or white smokers (for fluids emitted from the natural chimneys) are home to so many creatures. Crustal fluids in the seabed are vented due to volcanic heating near mid-ocean ridges and chimneys are built with the deposition of minerals in fluids coming out of solution when hot vent fluids (~60°C!) come in contact with the cool ~2°C ocean bottom water. These high pressure environments with hot fluids filled with the sorts of chemicals we find toxic like sulfides, are actually home to vibrant communities based on a food chain founded by chemosynthetic bacteria. These black smokers in the Pacific are often carpeted with these giant tube worms (& home to other invertebrates like limpets, clams, shrimp and more). These extremophiles may also be showing us that hydrothermal vents may have been a nursery for early life on this planet.

The giant tube worms (diameter ~4 cm, length up to 3 m) tolerate extremely high hydrogen sulfide levels and they were a great shock to the geologists who found them in this hostile environment. As adults they make a white chitinous tube, with a bright red branchial plume & NO digestive system but rely on symbiosis with chemosynthetic bacteria for nutrition!

 

Black Smoker multimedia: Cigar box, collaged papers, gouache, Posca pen, glue, washi tape. Ele Willoughby, 2024

 

 

Fuchsia Flatworm, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024

You'll remember I posted this one before: the strange and beautiful fuchsia flatworm (Pseudoceros ferrugineus) with its gorgeous aposematic colours, a warning to predators that it's not worth the trouble to try and eat. A flexible ruffled oval creature it is a little hard to capture in an illustration. It crawls around eating on the reefs of the Indo-Pacific without any fear of predators.

 

Elvis worm, linocut on washi, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

In 2020, scientists discovered 4 types of scale worms, with shimmering lavender, blue, orange and exoskeletons, which looked like they were wearing sequined jumpsuits like Elvis Presley! They named these worms Elvis worms. These species in the genus the genus Peinaleopolynoe are called P. goffrediae, P. mineoi, P. orphanae, and P. elvisi. The worm in my print is Peinaleopolynoe orphanae, a iridescent and lavender worm named for geobiologist Victoria Orphan. These fancy scale worms live in the nutrient-rich deep sea. P. orphanae have been observed biting and fighting each other. No matter how pretty, they are actually fierce little creatures in their sequined outfits.

To recreate these iconic worms in print form, I have used layers of delicate handmade Japanese washi paper and iridescent cellophane. It's a challenging thing to photograph or scan but the colours change with the angle of the light.

Triadic Colours, CYMK, Primary Colours, and Warm Colours and My Printer Solstice Prints

 

Ochre Sea Stars, linocut by Ele Willoughby on 8" x 8" washi paper

For the #PrinterSolstice prompt triadic colours, I choose the secondary colours orange, purple and green, which are three equidistant on the colour wheel. I was looking forward to #InsertAnInvert2024 and needing an intertidal creature.

My lino block print of two Pisaster ochraceus, generally known as the purple sea star, ochre sea star, or ochre starfish, on a bed of kelp, is hand-printed on 8" x 8" (20 cm x 20 cm) delicate white Japanese paper with bark inclusions. A common sea star, or starfish of the Pacific, it is a keystone species considered an indicator of health in the intertidal zone. Most of these starfish are purple but they can also come in orange (as shown), or ochre, yellow and brown.

These were amongst my favorite finds on the beaches of Vancouver Island.

A collection of small gel prints made with cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink, cut paper stencils, lino blocks and plant materials

For the #PrinterSolstice prompt CMYK I spent a morning experimenting with my gel plate, using paper stencils, lino blocks and plant materials and my process cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks.

For the #PrinterSolstice prompt primary colours, I thought I would play with adding yellow and red to a cyanotype (which are in tones of blue of course). I decided to return to my idea of contrasting a fractal Sierpiński triangle and the naturally occurring fractal shape of a fern leaf. The Sierpiński triangle (also called the Sierpiński gasket or Sierpiński sieve) is a fractal equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles. It's a self-similar sets—that is, it is a mathematically generated pattern that is reproducible at any magnification or reduction named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński. This was a decorative pattern many centuries before Sierpiński. I made a cyanotype of a fern leaf and used a gel plate to add a red circle. I lino block printed the yellow Sierpiński triangle.

Fractal Geometry, cyanotype with gel print and linocut, 9" x11" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

 

And for the final prompt warm colours, I looked ahead once again to prompts for #InsertAnInvert2024 and decided I needed to make a true crab.

Frog crab, linocut print on washi paper, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2024

 My hand-printed red frog crab (Ranina ranina), also known as a spanner crab or Huỳnh Đế crab, is hand-printed on Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper 8" x 8" (20.3 cm x 20.3 cm) square. This crab is found in tropical and sub-tropical waters offshore Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, the east coast of Africa, through the Indian ocean to  the Pacific offshore Japan and Hawai'i. It is the sole known member of its genus and it is fished for its meat. The 5.9" (15 cm) crabs live in 10 to 100 m (33–328 ft) or water, where they bury themselves in the sand during the day and hunt bottom-dwelling fish. Known as "frog crabs", on account of their elongated carapace and frog-like appearance. Their claws are modified into tools for digging, and the body is a rounded shape that is easy to bury in sand. Unlike most other true crabs, the abdomens of raninids are not curled under the cephalothorax, so they are a little unusual looking.

Ranina ranina is a regional specialty in some regions of the Philippines where it is known as curacha. It is generally eaten steamed as halabos, or cooked in coconut milk as ginataan. In Vietnam the species is named as "Huỳnh Đế crab", literally means "emperor crab" as it has been a favorite high-ranked cuisine of historical Vietnamese monarchs hailed "monarch of all the crab".