A biologist eating for two

This is a bit tangential to our usual fare, but I think it’s fun, and you may as well. A friend of mine, Cara Bertron, edits the creative and delightful quarterly compendium Pocket Guide. I submitted this image, entitled “A biologist eating for two,” for the current issue, which is themed “secret recipes.” It’s a cladogram of the phylogenetic relationships among all the (multicellular) organisms I (knowingly) ate when I was pregnant with my now two-year-old daughter. You’ll notice that I’ve mostly only organized the plants by family (instead of further by subfamily clade, genus or species, although there are a few exceptions, like in the Rosaceae and Brassicaceae). The illustrated relationships within other groups of organisms (for example, “mammals” or “fish”) are undoubtedly looser than that. I intend the figure to be more conceptually intriguing than factually informative, although I know that at least the plant phylogeny is right. The plant phylogeny is from phylomatic, and the remaining relationships are from Tree of Life. I made the figure using phylocom and Mesquite. Click on image to enlarge. Oh, and as for an explanation about some of the more unusual animals on here: my husband is a hunter, and some of our friends are hunters, too.