It's a Small World After All

As an amateur photographer and erstwhile biologist, I swoon over the winning images in Nikon's annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. The 2013 winners were just announced. This year's top shot is of Chaetoceros debilis, a chain-forming marine diatom. Love it! Check out those spines. Chaetoceros diatoms are my favorite type of phytoplankton.

Photograph by Wim van Egmond of the Micropolitan Museum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Image source here.

What, you mean you don't have a favorite phytoplankter? Really? I'm not sure we can be friends anymore.

Here's a photo I took of a Chaetoceros chain during my graduate research. This was taken at 40X magnification (400 times larger than life size) under ultraviolet light. The four large bright dots are the nuclei of the individual cells in the chain. The smaller specks throughout the image are primarily bacteria.

Chaetoceros diatom from a seawater sample taken at 10m at the BATS site, an open ocean sampling station—really just a set of coordinates—off the coast of Bermuda. Click to view the full-size image.