Deep Blue Chromis (Chromis abyssus)
Watercolor and colored pencil
The Deep Blue Chromis is a vibrant, almost glowing, species of damselfish with intense blue spots which lives in deep waters off the coast of Indonesia and other western Pacific tropical waters. Its unusual habitat of deep coral reefs helped made it one of the top ten new species discoveries of 2008. Chromis abyssus has the distinction of being the very first species to be registered in ZooBank (the online registry of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature) and it was formally described in an article published exactly 250 years after the start of biological classification, or taxonomy, by Carl Linnaeus. It is also one of the exemplar species within the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org) which has a visionary goal of providing in-depth information about all of life on earth. Though not much is known about this species’ ecology, more can be found and updates can be made on the EOL.
This illustration was produced for the exemplar pages of the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org)
Project: Commissioned for a collection of exemplar species pages during the launch phase of the Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org) whose goal is to provide information about every species on the planet.
Original: available. Contact tam@tamaraclark.com
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
For further re-use, please contact me directly at tam@tamaraclark.com.
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