More Invertebrate Prints

 

Motyxia sequoia, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

Motyxia are blind, bioluminescent, cyanide-producing millipedes known as Sierra luminous millipedes  from the southern Sierra Nevada, Tehachapi, and Santa Monica mountain ranges of California. I made this print for #InsertAnInvert2024 prompt "eyeless." My hand-printed linocut is printed in both regular and glow-in-the-dark ink so like Motyxia sequoia itself, the prints glow-in-the dark! Each print is on 8" x 8" cream coloured Japanese washi paper with bark inclusions.

Motyxia sequoia, glowing in the dark, linocut 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

These millipedes grow to 3 to 4 cm in length, 4.5 to 8 mm wide, with 20 body segments, excluding the head. Like other polydesmidans ("flat-backed" millipedes) they lack eyes and have prominent paranota (lateral keels). They are typically tan to orange-pink in colour with a dark mid-dorsal line;  they are fluorescent under black light and bioluminescent.

Diving Beetle Paroster pallescens, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

This is a hand-printed of the Paroster pallescens beetle, surface diving water beetle from Australia. It is printed on 8" x 8" Japanese paper. I made this print for the #InsertAnInvert2024 prompt diver.

I decided I should finally make an actual edition of my fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

Drosophila melanogaster, 9" x 12" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024

This linocut print highlights the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly or vinegar fly. A hind-printed ring with 5 of the different eye colour genetic mutations appear on lovely handmade Japanese washi paper with flecks of bark inclusions. Each print is 9" by 12" (22.9 cm by 30.4 cm).

A species of fly (the taxonomic order Diptera) in the family Drosophilidae, D. melanogaster is used as a model organism for biological research in genetics, physiology, microbial pathogenesis, and life history evolution.  It breads quickly, has only four pairs of chromosomes, and is easy to raise in the lab anywhere in the world. It's also a well-known pest in kitchens worldwide!

Æeolian Jellyfish

Æeolian Jellyfish, linocut with chine collé and glow-in-the dark in, 18 cm x 18 cm, by Ele Willoughby, 2014

This is a whimsical mini lino block print of the Æeolian Jellyfish, a widely unknown, and quite possibly, completely imaginary creature. Unlike other jellies, the Aeolian Jellyfish floats in the upper ocean of air, which blankets our planet.

The printed area is only 10 cm (3.9 inches) squared. The jellies have collaged or chine collé fine translucent white Japanese paper with visible fibres. The jellies are printed in UV-activated glow-in-the-dark ink. If exposed to ultraviolet light, including direct sunlight, the jellies glow. Each sheet is 18 cm (7.1 inches) squared and printed on white Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper. There are 15 prints in this first edition.

The Aeolian jellyfish (Æolia noctiluca) looks much like its sea-borne cousin Pelagia noctiluca (where "Pelagia" means of the sea, "nocti-" refers to night and "luca" to light). Similarly "Æolia" and Aeolian come from the Greek Æolus, the keeper of the winds, and refers to its air- or wind-borne nature. Also, both jellies are bioluminescent. That is, they have the ability to glow in the dark. There are some important differences between the two, including, of course, habitat. While both animals have radial symmetry, the Pelagia noctiluca has a single body cavity, called the gastrovascular cavity. In contrast, the Aeolian jellyfish has both an outer gastrovascular cavity and an inner air bladder. This latter organ performs analogously to the swim bladder found in some variety of fish (though more closely related to the swim bladder found in Siphonophore colonies like the Portuguese man o' war). It is essentially an enclosed, impermeable, gas balloon, which can expand and contract to allow the Aeolian jellyfish to rise or fall in the air column by adjusting its shape such that the pressure in the air bladder matches that of ambient pressure. The Aeolian jellyfish also has a special adaptation to evade predators like birds; it can rapidly metabolize any food to produce a flash of heat in the gastrovascular cavity wall, lining the swim bladder. This allows the trapped air balloon to be heated, causing it to rapidly expand and the Aeolian jellyfish to rise. To move laterally, the Aeolian jellyfish employs its tentacles to ride the winds.

Æeolian Jellyfish, glowing in the dark

As you might expect for a bioluminescent animal, the Aeolian jellyfish is noctunal. During the day the jelly passive rises as it warms in the sun and its air bladder heats and expands. Thus it spends the heat of the day in the stratosphere, out of reach of predators. As temperature falls at sunset, so does the Aeolian jellyfish, disguised as a twinkling star to the flying insects who are its prey. Hence, while lulled to complacency by this lovely light display, it's death from above for these unsuspecting insects.

Like many jellyfish (but not the Pelagia noctiluca), the Aeolian jellyfish begins its life as a bottom-dwelling polyp - where "bottom" refers not to the seafloor, but the ocean-air interface. They have been found on certain recently-discovered very shallow seamounts in the Pacific. Thus the polyps rest with their holdfast on these plateau-like features, bathed in seawater, while their "mouths" reach out into the air. When they metamorphose into the medusa form, the jellies float up into the sky.

Marine creatures and bioluminescence

Going in a manned submersible is definitely on my bucket list. My mother has made me promise not to tell her about it until I'm on dry land again. I've been obsessed with the idea, and with bioluminesce since I first witnessed many of these creatures over a decade ago. It is true what she says, that it's addictive. You have to order the scientists out of the lab and remind them they need to sleep in order to be awake for their next shift.

The communication aspect is something I'd like to capture.

Sneak peek of the Bioluminescent Comb Jelly Light Box

I haven't posted much by way of new creations lately. That's because I've been working on some larger projects (including the Space Jellyfish Fractal Triangle Quilt). I've been developping a prototype of a planned Bioluminescent Comb Jelly Light Box. What's a comb jelly? Well, they are these marvellous jellyfish-like marine creatures, the Ctenophora. The combs are the celia (the hairy bits) which they oscillate to swim. They are also voracious, invisible to prey, hermaphrodictic, and bioluminescent. Sometimes, I think that our science fiction depictions of space aliens are too tame; there are stranger creatures here on earth.



Compare, for instance with this:



The flashing is actually quite rapid. I took some artistic license here. Though it would be easy to use rapidly flashing LEDs to imitate the natural rythms of the bioluminescent comb jelly, I was concerned about the irriations/potential for inducing seizures of rapidly flashing lights.



I've been wanting to combine the two sides of my brain my scientific/technical background with my art, or to continue the trend (started with my experiments in thermochromic ink). I thought I would begin encorporating some electronics into my pieces. I am starting small. This is actually, a very very simple circuit.



I've simply combined a 9 Volt battery, with a and on/off switch on the positive rail, and a series/parallel LED array of these nifty, Diffused 5mm Slow Fade Flashing RGB LED. If you aren't used to thinking about electronics, this really is simple - trust me. If you can screw in a lightbulb, you can do this... with a little bit of practice. There are many LED calculators (like this one, for instance) which will tell you how to hook up arrays of LEDs. Basically, you need to make sure you have they with the right polarity (positive end to positive, negative to negative), you limit current (include appropriate resistors), and provide power. That's it. It is posible to get colour changing LEDs which you control with a microcontroller (the guts of a simple computer... basically a chip, which may have some bells and whistles), but since I just wanted the colours to change, these slow fade, self-flashing LEDs make everything simple. They only have the two leads (positive, and negative), so you can treat them like regular LEDs and they automatically fade and change colour. Because they are not manufactured completely uniformly, they do not synch up - which was precisely what I wanted.



I say 'transparent' when I mean 'translucent', but there you are. I plan some better images and video soon.

Imaginary Antarctic

One of the most marvellous things I've seen are Pacific harbour seals at night, surfacing at night in water rich with bioluminescent bacteria. They glow in the dark! This inspired this print. I imagined glow-in-the-dark seals, a Pygmy Right Whale, a mysteriously forming submarine miniature galaxy, between two icebergs, below a starry sky and the aurora australis. This is one of a (variable) edition of 20 screenprints (22.5 cm by 33 cm/8.6 inches by 13 inches). The south polar sky does vary from print to print. The seals, stars (in the sky and the sea) and the aurora are all printed in glow-in-the-dark ink. It's very hard to take a photo in the dark... but they really do glow!

In screenprint class, we took some of the prints into the dark room to have a better look. I don't know how to capture this in a photo... you'll have to take my word for it.

spectacularly ugly

The Mad Scientists of Etsy theme for June is Ichthyology. I can't even spell Ichthyology, as will come as no surprise to Reynardin. I look it up every time. Anglerfish are spectacularly ugly fish of the order Lophiiformes who use a fleshy growth from their heads (ummm... doesn't that sound appetizing?) as a lure to fish their prey. This one is a bottom-dwelling (benthic) predator with a bioluminescent lure (the esca or illicium). It's like Nature decided, well it's too dark down there to see much, let's make it as ugly as possible. If any little fishies think they see a big gaping jaw full of sharp, pointy teeth, by the eerie blue glow of the bioluminscent lure, they'll assume they must be imagining things. Nothing could be that ugly.

This is a lino block print of an anglerfish in white and blue ink on Japanese teal unryu paper, 7.35 inches by 15.5 inches (18.4 cm by 39.4 cm). It is one of a hand-pulled edition of 6.

Waitomo Glow-worm Caves

I left Awakino and headed for Waitomo. As I approached the town, I saw one of the 'blackwater' rafting companies. I wanted to see the glow-worm caves. RM & AS stopped and saw the caves on their drive from Auckland to Wellington and they were really impressed. I might have done a simpler (cheaper) tour or gone to see the glow-worms in one of the publicly accessible caves, but a) I was open to doing something more adventuresome and b) Graham said the blackwater rafting wasn't to be missed. I stopped at this first place and asked what they did and when they had tours. It was clear that I would have to spend the night in Waitomo and go in the morning, but it sounded like a good option. The girl there told me I could also book through the i-Site and compare what different companies had on offer. This is what I did, but I ended up going with that first company (Rap, Raft 'n' Rock, which was great, despite its name). They offer a bit of everything and a three hour tour for a fair price. It includes entry to the Glow-worm Museum, at the i-Site, which I visited that evening. It was a hokey, but it was informative about the geology and biology of the 'glow-worms' (though their chemistry was a bit absurd... not that that would bother most people... and the history seemed a bit sanitized... but anyhow, they serve their purpose).



I found myself a motel for the night. Motels in New Zealand are usually accommodations for families. They are large, not fancy, but include a mini-kitchen area. As soon as you arrive at a motel they present you with your milk. You see, you necessarily need tea (having just arrived), but you wouldn't have milk (having just arrived). I do drink tea, but not with milk, so I just saved mine in the fridge and drank it in the mornings.

At 8:45, I and the other participants (a young Danish couple and a Taiwanese guy) met our guide Mike at the Backpackers inn where they have their offices. (All photos are by Mike or other employees. Cavers are asked not to bring cameras. We really needed both hands free). We had to fill in a form (and I confessed to my previous knee injuries) and then were driven to their "five-star changing facilities" (our guide was blessed with the typical Kiwi humour - like the geophysicist who told me sheep are now rare since they are down to 35 million). These were shippping containers on a hillside, with toilet, shower and tub for washing wet suits.

We were given wet suits and boots, and then climbing gear. We then drove to the entry of the cave, where we practiced using the climbing gear on the open hillside. Then, one by one we abseiled the 27 m into the cave with our guide as brake man at the top. Once inside, we got an inner tube and began our walk through the (black) water. I saw an eel, a common resident of the caves (along with weta - a giant New Zealand insect like a grasshopper, spiders, and things I did not see like rats or possums).




We climbed through the caves for a while, both on the rock and through the river. Then we came to a larger cavern area where we were able to really see the glow-worms (rather than just the odd glint of bluish light). The glow-worms are really the larval stage of the Arachnocampa luminosa, a type a gnat which makes sticky threads to trap food like a spider. The threads are covered in sticky mucus and look like tiny chandeliers. The larvae can only eat and not excrete (and the adult has no mouth so the larvae must do all of the eating). The bioluminescence is a biproduct of digestion and used to attract food. Insects instinctively fly up, and in the dark of the caves, pinpoints of blue lights do look like the night sky. We were efficient enough in hiking through the caves that we had time to stop and watch a glow-worm eat a gnat which Mike caught and stuck on a thread.




We had a couple a periods of floating along the river on the inner tubes, or sort of swimming along on top of the inner tubes, freely or in a chain. And there were a few person-sized tunnels one could carefully crawl through. The caves themselves were pretty amazing.






Then we stopped for a snack of chocolate and hot juice and had a chance to hear about the formation of the caves and caving exploration. We climbed back out of the cave, drove the the changing rooms and showered. We returned to their offices where they fed us hot soup and showed the photographs that Mike had taken.

It was a great, fun and fascinating experience and I'm really glad I did this. I've wondered about caving before. I'm a little claustrophobic. Mainly that means I don't like being trapped. But, all of the tunnels we climbed through were short enough that I could see either the exit or at least light from the opposite side, so it didn't bother me. It was really a different world for me. Plus, bioluminescence is high on my 'things which are inherently cool' list. It was quite magical to float down the river in the dark with bluish star-like illumination from the glow-worms above.