Dazzling Miniatures: View Highlights from BioScapes Photo Contest
Small worlds writ large under the microscope
Dazzling Miniatures: View Highlights from BioScapes Photo Contest
- Radiolarian skeleton: Radiolaria, single-celled, amoebalike creatures that inhabit all the world’s oceans, sport radially arranged protrusions called axopodia that here resemble buttons. The axopodia help the critters to float and ingest food. To produce the picture of this 120-micron-long radiolarian skeleton, Christopher B. Jackson of Ikelos in Switzerland took 15 light-microscope images, captured each one at a different focal plane and then combined the set to achieve a sharp image. Christopher B. Jackson
- Bay scallop: Kathryn R. Markey has a thing about scallop eyes. So she set about recruiting a spat bay scallop from the Luther H. Blount Shellfish Hatchery at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., to show the rest of the world their “majestic eyes”—the blueberrylike circles at the borders of the shell. This exemplar of Argopecten irradians went under a stereomicroscope in the university’s Aquatic Diagnostic Laboratory, where Markey works, to have its portrait taken. Kathryn R. Markey
- Immune cell: A single mast cell has infiltrated the eye surface in response to a perceived invasion by a foreign substance. Mast cells, which contain vesicles of histamine (red specks), are among the immune system’s first responders, attracting other immune cells to the site of an infection. Here the release of histamine is helping to separate collagen fibers through which the mast cell is migrating. Donald W. Pottle of the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston took this confocal microscope image. Markey works, to have its portrait taken. Donald W. Pottle
- Rotifer: Two lobes of the corona of the rotifer Floscularia ringens, spanning 300 microns, emerge from a protective tube. The cilia at the edge of the corona move in a fast, steady, wavelike motion called a metachronal wave, creating water currents that move food to the rotifer’s mouth. The tube consists of reddish-brown circular pellets that the rotifer forms in a cilia-lined socket. A new pellet forms at the center of this first-prize photograph taken by Charles Krebs of Issaquah, Wash. Once the pellet reaches the appropriate size, the rotifer retreats into its tube and, on the way down, quickly but carefully “plants” the new pellet along the top edge of the tube. Charles Krebs
- Slime molds: Ultraviolet light causes the mushroomlike fruiting bodies of myxomycetes, or slime molds, to luminesce with a ghostly aura. Dalibor Matýsek, a mineralogist at the Technical University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic who images biological objects as a hobby, used “focus stacking,” combining more than 100 scanned images to form a three-dimensional picture of the 4.4-millimeter-tall Arcyria stipata. Dalibor Matýsek
- Prickly scorpion's tail: This thin, twisted, five-centimeter-long pod resembles the tail of a scorpion, giving the plant that produced the pod its name. Viktor Sykora of Charles University’s First Faculty of Medicine in Prague does microphotography of plants as a hobby and has published a book on the topic. Viktor Sykora
- Hoverfly leg: A section of the leg of a female hoverfly, stretching several hundred microns across, bears two pulvilli, adhesive structures that enable the insect to stick to a surface. The pulvilli, seen here as large, orange appendages at the upper right that form a V shape, are connected to the leg by a spring system (blue areas), which consists mainly of the protein resilin. Jan Michels of Kiel University in Germany made the photograph of Eristalis tenax as part of a study on the potential of confocal laser scanning microscopy to furnish three-dimensional images of resilin-containing insect body parts. Jan Michels
- Stinkbug eggs: Amateur photographer Haris S. Antonopoulos found these eggs on top of a mountain near Athens, Greece. He took a series of images of the 1.2-millimeter-diameter eggs and combined them with photo-editing software. The white halos outline the lids through which nymphs emerge. Haris S. Antonopoulos
