Anna Mehlhorn

Artist Background

As a biology major and art minor, Anna enjoys blending her scientific and artistic interests by practicing scientific illustration. Recently, as a lab artist for Dr. Jonathan Allen's invertebrate ecology lab, she has been creating figures in Photoshop representing the wide variety of larval cloning strategies employed by brittle stars and their potential ecological impacts. She believes artistic scientific communication is important to conveying complex ideas in a manner that is both beautiful and easily digestible, which is why graphical abstracts like this one are valuable tools in research.

The three photographs above display three main brittle star life stages, from six-arm larva to juvenile to adult, respectively. This graphical abstract proposes questions relating to brittle star larval cloning to address differences in the physical forces and molecular biology of this unique process. Through a mechanism the Allen lab is just beginning to understand, "arm bit" pieces can dissociate from six arm larvae to generate their own fully functional clones. This figure also highlights the great potential for interdisciplinary collaboration in biomechanics, ecology, and developmental biology to answer questions such as, "are the adults of larval clones reproductive?" and "does predation induce cloning?"

References

1. Photographs courtesy of William & Mary Biology Professor Dr. Jonathan Allen