Our inaugural Goodson Award went to Eduardo Zattara for his image “Ready to See the Light.” Eduardo is a postdoc in Armin Moczek’s lab, where he studies how developmental mechanisms contribute to evolution of novel traits. As Eduardo describes this image, female dung beetles lay eggs inside a custom-built dung brood-ball underground; the larva hatches and remains inside the brood-ball, feeding from it until it molts into a pupa in order to undergo metamorphosis into the adult form. During this process, the prominent optic lobes grow and extend into the developing compound eyes so that upon adult emergence, the beetle is fully ready to dig itself out of the ground and into an open world of light and color.
2016 Goodson Award for Art in Science
