A visual compendium of glowing creatures

Hello! My name is Eleanor and I’m a self-employed artist from Seattle. This blog post is the first installment of what will hopefully be a year-long infographic design project. I’ve always been into biology and design, so I’m taking a year off after college to see if I can combine the two with at least marginal success.

It’s more of an experiment than anything else, so feel free to leave comments about what works, what doesn’t, and what might be scientifically incorrect despite my best efforts. I spend a lot of time trying to make these infographics accurate (for this post I read a 468 page textbook and used over 200 other sources) but naturally I’m not an expert in every subject I write about. Today’s post diagrams a few of the most well studied bioluminescent organisms. Hope you enjoy it, and thanks for stopping by :)

• Acknowledgements

• Thank you to bioluminescence researcher Steven Haddock for his help with animal physiology, and to evolutionary biologist Jordi Paps for his help with phylogeny.
• The majority of the information used in this chart comes from the textbook Bioluminescence: Chemical Principles and Methods (Revised Edition) by Osamu Shimomura.