Deep Sea Anglerfish

Chase Brownstein and colleages at Yale have just published research in Current Biology about deep sea anglerfish. This group of fish has the unique trait of sexual parasitism, whereby males are much smaller than females and attach themselves to her. The researchers demonstrate a connection between the evolution of sexual parasitism and radiation into the deep sea environment. 

I painted a number of deep sea anglerfishes, frogfishes, batfishes, and others for this paper. It was a big challenge because the frogfishes are very camouflaged and have tons of color and pattern complexity and variation. For the deep sea species, reference photos are often very limited or are of specimens in poor health. Despite the challenges, this was such a fun project to do. The fish are so weird and interesting! I quickly discovered that watercolor doesn't get quite black enough, so many of the fish are painted in gouache, which was fun to play with.