Spike Walker, a retired biology lecturer based in Penkridge, England, was striving for visual abstraction when he captured a detail of a Dytiscus water beetle’s front leg....[More]
Beetle leg
Spike Walker, a retired biology lecturer based in Penkridge, England, was striving for visual abstraction when he captured a detail of a Dytiscus water beetle’s front leg. Walker used a type of darkfield microscopy in which the object is shot against a blue screen. The blue light shines through the orange of the leg’s exoskeleton. The view, spanning about 1.8 millimeters in width, shows hair (left and bottom) and a suction cup (large disk on right). The males use these suction cups to hold on to females during mating. The image is patched together from 44 shots, each having a different focal plane.
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Spike Walker
Weed stamens
The henbit deadnettle is a common weed. Edwin K. Lee, a retired microbiologist, picked one from the roadside near his home in Carrollton, Tex., to see if it might make an interesting subject for his microscope....[More]
Weed stamens
The henbit deadnettle is a common weed. Edwin K. Lee, a retired microbiologist, picked one from the roadside near his home in Carrollton, Tex., to see if it might make an interesting subject for his microscope. He removed the stamens from the flowers and photographed them using polarized light, to enhance the oranges and browns of the anthers, the pollen-carrying heads. The stamens are about three millimeters wide.
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Edwin K. Lee
Blackfly larva
Tens of thousands of tiny creatures resembling polyps can sometimes be seen attached to rocks or aquatic plants on a single square meter of Normandy’s riverbeds, extending their tentacles (or “cephalic fans”) to capture particles of food, says Fabrice Parais, a hydrobiologist at the Regional Directorate for Environment, Land-Use Planning and Housing....[More]
Blackfly larva
Tens of thousands of tiny creatures resembling polyps can sometimes be seen attached to rocks or aquatic plants on a single square meter of Normandy’s riverbeds, extending their tentacles (or “cephalic fans”) to capture particles of food, says Fabrice Parais, a hydrobiologist at the Regional Directorate for Environment, Land-Use Planning and Housing. But these creatures are not polyps; they are insects: larvae of blood-sucking blackflies. Parais catalogues and develops methods to analyze specimens such as this one (which he conserved in formaldehyde and shot in darkfield microscopy) so that scientists can monitor biodiversity and thus spot signs of pressure on the ecosystem. Each tentacle is about two millimeters long.
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Fabrice Parais
Spider eyes
First prize in the BioScapes competition went to Igor Siwanowicz of the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology near Munich for his confocal microscope picture of the eyes of a daddy longlegs....[More]
Spider eyes
First prize in the BioScapes competition went to Igor Siwanowicz of the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology near Munich for his confocal microscope picture of the eyes of a daddy longlegs. The false-color image shows a cutaway view of the eyes, with the lenses (two large ovals), which are spaced less than a millimeter apart, and the retinas, which consist of a single layer of rodlike photoreceptor cells that give the spider rather poor, monochromatic vision. The photoreceptors’ nuclei appear here as cyan, and the cells’ elongated bodies are in a range of colors, from purple to reddish.
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Igor Siwanowicz
Actin filaments
Nucleated cells have an internal scaffolding called a cytoskeleton, made in part of filaments of the protein actin. The image shows purified-actin filaments (tens of microns long) that Dennis Breitsprecher grew on a dish when he was a biochemistry graduate student at Hannover Medical School in Germany....[More]
Actin filaments
Nucleated cells have an internal scaffolding called a cytoskeleton, made in part of filaments of the protein actin. The image shows purified-actin filaments (tens of microns long) that Dennis Breitsprecher grew on a dish when he was a biochemistry graduate student at Hannover Medical School in Germany. Researchers are discovering hundreds of enzymes that regulate the evolving shape of the cytoskeleton, he says. But, he adds, only the right choice of enzymes produces the wavy shapes seen here: “I know what protein to add to make it look nice.”
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Dennis Breitsprecher
Flea organ
Vintage microscopy slides—especially those from the Victorian era—are collectors’ items that hobbyists buy online or in specialized shops....[More]
Flea organ
Vintage microscopy slides—especially those from the Victorian era—are collectors’ items that hobbyists buy online or in specialized shops. David Walker, a retired petrol chemist from Huddersfield, England, produced this detail of a flea specimen (showing a 0.7-millimeter-long sensory organ called a sensillum) by training his lens on a late-1800s or early-1900s prepared slide he bought on eBay for $15 or so. He altered the colors with photo-retouching software.
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David Walker
Honey mushroom
Reminiscent of the sensuous folds in some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, the mushroom underside visible in the middle image was photographed by Neil Egan of Cleveland....[More]
Honey mushroom
Reminiscent of the sensuous folds in some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, the mushroom underside visible in the middle image was photographed by Neil Egan of Cleveland. Honey mushrooms are common around the facility where he works (as a quality-control technician for a manufacturer of automotive finishes); he found this one growing on a dead tree stump. Egan says he is not new to looking for beauty in ordinary objects: “The more you look at things, the more interesting they become.”
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Neil Egan
Moth wing
We think of moths as grayish, boring-looking nocturnal bugs. But the sunset moth of Madagascar, or Chrysiridia rhipheus , is a diurnal creature with beautifully iridescent wings....[More]
Moth wing
We think of moths as grayish, boring-looking nocturnal bugs. But the sunset moth of Madagascar, or Chrysiridia rhipheus, is a diurnal creature with beautifully iridescent wings. Scales on the wings have multiple layers of cuticle with varying nanometer-scale spacings between them that produce colors by optical interference. Laurie Knight, a Web developer in Tonbridge, England, took multiple shots of these scales with 20× magnification. He then used special software to meld the shots into one image on his “overclocked,” made-to-spec computer.
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Laurie Knight
Mushroom coral
The corals familiar to most of us are colonies of small polyps that build calcium carbonate branches. But mushroom corals, such as this one, are loners....[More]
Mushroom coral
The corals familiar to most of us are colonies of small polyps that build calcium carbonate branches. But mushroom corals, such as this one, are loners. James Nicholson, a retired medical-imaging specialist, photographed the five-centimeter-wide live specimen of an unidentified species for the Coral Culture and Collaborative Research Facility—a laboratory in Charleston, S.C., operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other institutions—where he works as an unpaid consultant. Nicholson and his collaborators want to learn how to monitor environmental stress, such as that resulting from oil spills or rising temperatures. The small bumps are tentacles the animal uses to push food toward its mouth, which is the white slit in the middle.
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James Nicholson
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3 Comments
Add CommentReally great...so colourful and amazing!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissouls joining with the great spirit????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWOW! These are actually so pretty, especially the moth wings. The butterfly larvae were kind of scary though.
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