University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

One side effect of playing with ways to visualise and integrate biology
databases is that you stumble across the weird and wonderful stuff that
living organisms get up to. My earliest papers were on crustacean
taxonomy, so I thought I\'d try my [latest
toy](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2011/03/visualising-symbiome-hosts-parasites.html)
on them.  
  
**What lives on crustaceans?**  
  
The \"symbiome\" graph for crustacea shows a range of associations,
including marine bacteria (*Vibrio*), fungi (microsporidians), and other
organisms, including other crustacea (crustaceans are at the top of the
circle, I\'ll work on labelling these diagrams a little better).  
  
![Crusthost](http://lh4.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/TYzOn-0sAeI/AAAAAAAAA4A/wryA6JiYuwE/crusthost.png?imgmax=800){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="400" height="316"}**What do crustaceans live
on?**![Crustpara](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/TYzOm0kt2EI/AAAAAAAAA38/kh6Gx8EkEeA/crustpara.png?imgmax=800){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="400"}  
  
Crustacea (in addition to parasitising other crustacea) parasitise
several vertebrates groups, including fish and whales. But they also
occur in terrestrial vertebrates. For example, sequence
[EF583871](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/EF583871) is from the
pentastomid worm [*Porocephalus
crotali*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porocephalus_crotali) from a dog.
When people think of terrestrial crustacea they usually don\'t think of
parasites. There\'s also a prominent line from crustaceans to what turns
out to be corals, representing coral-living barnacles.  
  
It\'s instructive to compare this with insects, which similarly
parasitise vertebrates. The striking difference is the association
between insects and flowering plants.  
  
![Insect](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/TYzOoTV31zI/AAAAAAAAA4E/Xcsl4KJiGXI/insect.png?imgmax=800){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="400" height="318"}  
  
I guess these really need to be made interactive, so we could click on
them and discover more about the association represented by each line in
the diagram.  


One side effect of playing with ways to visualise and integrate biology databases is that you stumble across the weird and wonderful stuff that living organisms get up to. My earliest papers were on crustacean taxonomy, so I thought I'd try my latest toy on them.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Fun things about crustaceans