Developmental biology
Embryonic staging diagrams
These are diagrams of embryogenesis of the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus. Feel free to use them for personal, teaching, or presentation purposes. These are modified versions of Figures 1, 2, 3, 11, and S1 in Donoughe and Extavour (Developmental Biology 2016).
Lab reference infographic
This poster is an amalgamation of nearly everything I know about the embryogenesis of Gryllus bimaculatus. It includes most of the figures from Donoughe and Extavour (Developmental Biology 2016), a figure from Nakamura et al (Current Biology 2010), and several from Kainz (PhD Thesis 2009). It also includes summaries of additional staging information from five other publications:
Printed at full size, this poster is 130cm x 60cm (51″ x 24″). Contact me if you would like the high resolution PDF; I’d be happy to share it.
Macroevolutionary patterns of tissue diversity
Insect eggs
Visualizations of the diversity of insect egg morphology illustrated with laterally oriented silhouettes. The data from all of the images on this page are taken from the dataset described in this paper.
Egg silhouettes, each from a different species of insect, sorted by aspect ratio along the y-axis, with the most elongated eggs at the top. Eggs are colored according to taxonomic order: Hymenoptera in green, Hemiptera in blue, Diptera in magenta, and Orthoptera in yellow:
Egg silhouettes from 2000 insect species all shown at the same scale, and sorted by size along the y-axis:
Animations
Conference outreach
I designed the advertising materials for the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology conference, including an animated version of the poster for sharing online:
Allometric scaling
Insect eggs come in a stunningly wide range of sizes. In fact, they cover more than a 100,000,000-fold range of volumes. This animation illustrates the scale of eggs with silhouettes of real eggs, all drawn from the order Hymenoptera, i.e. ants, bees, and wasps:
