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Description
I really like rotifers, but they are among the most severely underappreciated and obscure members of the animal kingdom. After years of jokingly claiming that everything needs more rotifers, I caved in and finally decided to practice what I preach. That is, I filled a vacant niche by making some original characters based on rotifers--and teaching myself how to draw these transparent, microscopic animals in the process.

Rotifers have astonishing morphological diversity: some are slender and leech-like, some are shelled and flat, some are vast and oblong, some are protected by sharp spines, some have locomotory appendages such as paddles or setae or lobopods, and the list goes on. I couldn't possibly represent all of Phylum Rotifera with just one character. Thus, I made a quartet of rotifers, each with a different combination of species- or genus-specific features. There is still so much rotifer diversity left over that I might design more such rotifer hybrids, though their roles as characters would most likely be peripheral.

The rotifer depicted in this first set of illustrations is Colleen. She is basically a Collotheca mutabilis minus the mucous cocoon and with the feather-like paddles of Polyarthra spp. Colleen's name is an Anglicization of the first syllable of Collotheca. I came up with the names for the other rotifer characters (Connie, Tessie, and Steph) in the same way.

Collotheca mutabilis is my favorite rotifer. I think it is the most visually accessible and relatable rotifer for a human audience, because it bears a whimsical, almost cartoony resemblance to a sock puppet. Collotheca rotifers are ambush predators: rather than generating a current and filter feeding, one of these rotifers waits around with its mouth-like infundibulum hanging open. When a small organism blunders into its infundibulum, it snaps shut like a venus fly trap. And much as a venus fly trap has spiky "teeth," the infundibulum is tipped with numerous long, coarse setae. There is an excellent photo of what a real Collotheca mutabilis looks like, approximately 2/5 of the way down on this microscopy page .

Description
I really like rotifers, but they are among the most severely underappreciated and obscure members of the animal kingdom. After years of jokingly claiming that everything needs more rotifers, I caved in and finally decided to practice what I preach. That is, I filled a vacant niche by making some original characters based on rotifers--and teaching myself how to draw these transparent, microscopic animals in the process.

Rotifers have astonishing morphological diversity: some are slender and leech-like, some are shelled and flat, some are vast and oblong, some are protected by sharp spines, some have locomotory appendages such as paddles or setae or lobopods, and the list goes on. I couldn't possibly represent all of Phylum Rotifera with just one character. Thus, I made a quartet of rotifers, each with a different combination of species- or genus-specific features. There is still so much rotifer diversity left over that I might design more such rotifer hybrids, though their roles as characters would most likely be peripheral.

The rotifer depicted in this first set of illustrations is Colleen. She is basically a Collotheca mutabilis minus the mucous cocoon and with the feather-like paddles of Polyarthra spp. Colleen's name is an Anglicization of the first syllable of Collotheca. I came up with the names for the other rotifer characters (Connie, Tessie, and Steph) in the same way.

Collotheca mutabilis is my favorite rotifer. I think it is the most visually accessible and relatable rotifer for a human audience, because it bears a whimsical, almost cartoony resemblance to a sock puppet. Collotheca rotifers are ambush predators: rather than generating a current and filter feeding, one of these rotifers waits around with its mouth-like infundibulum hanging open. When a small organism blunders into its infundibulum, it snaps shut like a venus fly trap. And much as a venus fly trap has spiky "teeth," the infundibulum is tipped with numerous long, coarse setae. There is an excellent photo of what a real Collotheca mutabilis looks like, approximately 2/5 of the way down on this microscopy page .