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?