Two of Danielle Sobol’s (’12) watercolor paintings of Raritan Bay plankton.
Danielle Sobol ’12, an art major and summer Mellon scholar, is contributing to our Raritan Bay research project by painting a series of watercolors representing the most abundant plankton, crustaceans, and fish that we see in the Bay. Last year, she painted 10 species of phytoplankton. These paintings have been floating from the ceiling of Kunkel Hall’s sitting room since January. This summer, she painted 14 additional paintings of copepods, cladocerans, rotifers, gastropods, polychaete worms, ctenophores, and crabs as part of her Mellon-supported work. The painting on the left is the warty comb jelly (Mnemiopsis leidyii), which we find in in very high abundance in Raritan Bay in July. In fact, this past week, concentrations were around 4 organims per liter (i.e., 8 of these comb jellies in a 2-liter bottle of coke!)! The warty comb jelly is a carnivore that eats zooplankton, fish larvae and other ctenophores. The painting on the right is a copepod, which are the most abundant animals in our monthly plankton collections. Copepods are small crustaceans with more than 10,000 marine species.