Science communication can come in many shapes and sizes. But a picture still tells a thousand words.

And in this case, there are about 6,000 words worth of mosquito communication to be found on PhD student Ana Ramirez’s Figshare page on which she has assembled a host of humanity’s most dangerous animals, in awesome graphical form.

The collection can be cited via https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4208051.v4 and is fully open access via a CC BY 4.0 license which only asks for appropriate credit if you use the images. You can employ these fantastic representations in papers, seminars, workshops, blogs, citizen science endeavours, classrooms, lectures, social media…the sky is the limit.

This is impressive stuff and not just because Ana’s gained these skills with the freeware software Inkscape in a ridiculously short period of time. Ana has also generated these images while working on her Ph.D and writing up its results in an envious and accumulating stack of publications…

• Mosquito excreta: A sample type with many potential applications for the investigation of Ross River virus and West Nile virus ecology.
• Modifying the Biogents Sentinel Trap to Increase the Longevity of Captured Aedes aegypti.
• Searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack: advances in mosquito-borne arbovirus surveillance.

This is impressive stuff and a great example of how scientists can find new and exciting ways to leverage their newly gained knowledge to help inform the community at large and help out their peers as well! Expect to see some of these used in future blog posts when the focus is on mosquitoes.

Views: 1441