hey, my name is Benjamin, I’m a marine biologist working on fish cognition.
I’m looking for a relatively easy 3d model of a specific species of fish in a tank, laptop and a screen, to use in scientific papers and presentations. something very similar to the attached pics.
please let me know if interested 
If someone is happy to do this for free ok, but I find this post really disrespectful for the 3D art community. Scientist get good grants for doing research, these research grants could easily cover the costs for the people doing this for you, mainly if those will be of use in the progression of your academic career (the academic papers you’ll get illustrated) and with which you’ll even get further grants and recognition. Because these illustrations will probably play a role in your paper being accepted for publication.
This job is “work for free for someone who will use the work to get money for themselves” (a research grant or a new position, partly thanks to the wonderful papers that included these 3D illustrations), but of course some people might be interested in helping if they don’t know what the academic world is about and that academics have money for research expenses but would do whatever it takes to get everything for free if they can. They’d rather save whatever money they could have spent in this gig so they have more money to travel to conferences in which aside from presenting they also get a nice short holiday for themselves. The artist will not get any of these benefits of course because they are not the researcher but it would be fair that they’ll get an adequate pay for their job. Asking people to do this for free is really taking advantage of the good will of people.