Breaking plotting rules

The interesting thing about this plot is the reversed x-axis: from left to right "vegetation height" goes from tall to short vegetation. Note the right-hand arrow indicating this unusual x-axis scale. The authors explain that this was done to "...emphasize that islands with low vegetation are more dissimilar from Staniel than are islands with high vegetation.".

More generally, this plot illustrates that there are apparently fixed plotting rules that can be (carefully) broken in a very interesting way.

Reference J.B. Losos, K.I. Warheit and T.W. Schoener (1997) Adaptive differentiation following experimental island colonization in Anolis lizards. Nature 387: 70-73.  (download pdf)