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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Bring out the Tats Round 1

DSN recently posted Ocean Tattoos from the illustrious Love Lab at UCSC UCSB. Of course mindful of the historic Invertebrate Wars and the recent artful attempts by pro-echinoderm agents to renew the conflicts, I thought maybe a survey of science tattoo subjects could be used as a proxy to head it off.

With that in mind I headed over to Carl Zimmer's science tattoo galleries for a pilot study. I figured out of the 200 or so science tattoo's in his gallery at most a quarter of them were of animals so that would provide a nice sample size I could handle between classes. Sure enough, I ended up with 41 tattoos for which the animal was the subject, and that wasn't of a specific personality (e.g. no Darwin tattoos). I then evaluated each tat for the main subject phylum, except the case of the chordata, where I evaluated as invertebrate chordates and vertebrates (this being an invert centric blog after all)

The score:
Vertebrates: 16
Invertebrate Chordates: 1 (Pikaia)
Arthopoda: 13
Cnidaria : 2
Echinodermata: 2
Lobopodia: 1
Mollusca : 5

For the invertebrate war phyla, I was surprised that both echinoderms and molluscs are so under-represented in the gallery. I may have to get a tat for graduation, and another when I get a masters.

Hopefully the Love Lab won't be so vertebrate skewed...

Hmmm... who belongs to this winning one?

6 comments:

  1. Careful now. Love lab is at ucsB not ucsC...

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  2. I'm actually shocked the arthropods are so underrepresented... I mean, one? With the whole range of Arthropoda as options?

    I think I need to get a Porifera tattoo. They just aren't getting the love they deserve.

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  3. Prize to Miriam!

    Todd...don't know why I had UCSC on the brain... UCSB it is!

    Christie, somehow the "3" got dropped when I imported the posting... that should be 13 Arthopod tattoos. Mostly Triobites and Insects.

    As for the Porifera... I agree they get very little tattoo love (or any other kind for that matter!)

    Also no Salp love to be seen, I can't be the only one who thinks a salp (and a Salp + Phronima amphipod) would be a cool tattoo?

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  4. Oh yeah, you are counting that as two points for molusca, right?

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  5. Oh... good point!

    That will make Love Lab's a bit more complicated though... several multi-species and multi-phylum tats there.

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