Variations on a theme: crayfish nociception

Back in 2010, I had just co-authored a paper on crustacean nociception with Sakshi Puri. At the time, we had already started the follow-up experiments that have just been published.

Now there was a bit of a gap between the two papers, which means that this research was presented at quite a few conferences. Six of them, all told. Click on any to enlarge!

The first poster in the series was for the International Association of Astacology in 2010. This one shows how many of the experiments that made it into the 2015 paper were already in the can (to borrow an old movie making phrase) back in 2010!

Graphically, the red used in the central graph in the middle was picked up from the colour of the crayfish in the pot on the upper right. The greens used in the headings were picked up with an eyedropper from the colour of the wasabi.

While the crayfish boil provided a nice illustration of the question that initially motivated these experiments, it’s hard to make out that they are crayfish from a distance. The rest of the posters have big pictures of individual crayfish, or their close relatives, lobsters.

Later that same summer, I attended the Ninth International Congress of Neuroethology in Spain. This one is different from the others for two reasons:

1. It was the only one in portrait format (and a fairly small total size, too). I’ve heard fairly consistently that posters for European conferences are portrait more often than North American conferences.
2. It was made in PosterGenius (reviewed here) rather than Microsoft Publisher.

I switched from the picture from a shot of many crayfish in a pot to a single lobster in a pot. As a result, the colour palette for this poster completely changed. The lobster is greys and blues, so the graph and headings are those colours, too.

Making this in Poster Genius was a challenge, because I recall it being difficult to adjust the size of the text. I couldn’t use my usual trick of making the text for the references smaller, so I struggled greatly to make everything fit. As a result, this poster came out rather text heavy.

The following summer,  in 2011, I went to The Crustacean Society meeting. We had done more experiments over the year, and this was the first appearance of the behavioural responses to high temperature stimuli. Video gives a much better sense of the behaviour than any graph, so this was an early appearance of a QR code that people could scan to watch the video. I don’t recall many people using it.

This was also the first appearance of the title that my co-author, Sakshi Puri, wanted our paper to have, and which ultimately became the title of the paper. When we started the experiments, I’d joked with her that I’d wanted it to be, “Do crayfish like spicy food?”

I also think Sakshi asked for us to set the poster in Time New Roman rather than sans serifs.

I think of all the posters, this one is, in some ways, the least successful. There was a lot of space at the bottom that are filled with pictures that could go anywhere. And the spacing between the habanero and wasabi pictures is a little too wide. The colours used for the spikes are a little bright.

I was pleased to have found a lovely crayfish picture from Michael Bok that appears on several later posters. 

In fall of that year, we took this project to “the big show”: the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2011. (Sakshi blogged about her experience here.)

This paper is a little reminiscent of the first one in this series, in that it uses a lot of red for graphs and headings. The heading here was a font called Orial that has some nice detailing, although in retrospect, it was a little too subtle for people to notice.

People scanned the QR code a lot, according to Sakshi.

This meeting was important, because another poster at that meeting had a technique for studying responses to low temperatures, using dry ice. We did that experiment soon after, and it made it onto the next iteration of the poster.

In 2012, I presented at the Tenth International Congress for Neuroethology.

I was proud of the use of the two callout boxes in this one. I thought the light red backgrounds were sufficiently different to signal that these were not part of the main narrative, but subtle enough not to be distracting.

I did away with headings, using drop caps as another way to signal sections.

While the QR code still appears with a link to a video of the behaviour, that was purely a backup. Most of the time, the code was covered by my new iPad that I stapled to the spot. I carefully designed the code and the text so that it would not be seen when the iPad was on top of it. This meant that much of the poster was designed around how big my iPad was! The width of the iPad helped determine the column width, and therefore how many columns the poster would get.

One of the big sticking points in publishing the paper was trying to get neurophysiological records from the claw, which are shown on this poster. These didn’t make it into the final paper. Ultimately, that proved too hard to get good recordings, so we went back to using the antennae, which we’d used in our 2010 paper.

The final version of the poster appeared at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in early 2014.

I was happy with the picture I found as the entry point. I love the expression on the woman’s face, and it perfectly reflects why people are always asking about, “Are lobsters / crayfish / crabs / shrimp hurt when they’re cooked?”

Again, there are reds in the graphs throughout, because of the colours in the animals and the Nature article screen grabs.

While I often rail against boxes, I tried them here. I think they work because rather than putting a box around each individual part, I used the boxes as column separators. I’d seen this done occasionally in magazine and newspaper layouts. I went for extremely light lines (they look finer on the poster than in the image here).

When seen all at once, in this small format, several of them look a bit busy because of the physiology recordings. They often look very busy, and they use a lot of colours. The last two posters perhaps fare a little better because they don’t have those complex charts.

In looking at these again, I am pleased to see what I think might be some progress. The last two are, I think, a little more successful than the earlier ones. After all, for the first ones, I’d only been blogging about poster design for about a year. By the time I did that last one, this blog was closer to five years old.

Do you have a favourite?

Related posts

Small conference, big conference
iPoster

References


Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2015. Can crayfish take the heat? Procambarus clarkii show nociceptive behaviour to high temperature stimuli, but not low temperature or chemical stimuli. Biology Open: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1242/bio.20149654