[Originally published as a news release from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum. Read the full article >]
The Arboretum is excited to release The Wonderful World of Microbes – a fascinating and beautifully illustrated zine about the widespread influence of tiny organisms we usually can’t see. The digital zine (a small self-published magazine) is written by Charlotte Francoeur, a fifth-year microbiology PhD student at UW–Madison, with art by illustrator Lindsey Leigh.
The zine highlights microbes in areas of health and the environment: from antibiotics, to symbiotic relationships in nature, to wastewater, to the role of microbes in ecological communities like wetlands, prairies, and forests. Written as engaging and friendly narrative, with delightful illustrations, The Wonderful World of Microbes invites readers to understand and appreciate worlds and relationships we rarely see but are an essential part of life.
Charlotte became interested in microbes – especially bacteria – in high school, when she learned about how much microbes profoundly influence everything inside and around us. Since then, she has fully embraced that we live in a microbial world: everything on Earth is supported by microbes! She wrote the zine to share stories that reveal our world through a microbial lens. She hopes that after you read the zine, you will see everything – from the water in your toilet to the trees in the forest – differently!
You can download The Wonderful World of Microbes from the multimedia resources page. It is available in two different PDF formats: consecutive pages or booklet layout.
The publication is an outcome of a collaboration cultivated by the WISCIENCE Public Service Fellows program. This program is funded in part by the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the National Science Foundation’s Innovations in Graduate Education grant #1806908.
—Susan Day, communications coordinator