Joseph Tomelleri has varied field experience in aquatic biology. He worked briefly as a botanist, but later turned full time to illustration in 1986. He has traveled more than 135,000 miles to collect live fishes for his scientific renderings. Joseph Tomelleri's illustrations have appeared in more than 200 publications, including 25 books, magazines, advertisements, greeting cards, T-shirts, furniture, posters, trading cards, newspapers, and identification guides. His detailed quality illustrations of fishes are rare, because few wildlife scientists have the artistic talent to produce drawings that are accurate technically and aesthetically beautiful as well. Fishes differ in subtle ways and demand unusual observational activity to capture the details that distinguish various species. Joseph Tomelleri has mastered this skill with his superb drawings. These are done in prismacolor pencil and are detailed with graphite. Research for this series was conducted in the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.