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What Are You Swimming With?
Baby trout, water mites, bits of tentacles, and all sorts of other tiny living things litter the water we splash around in. Here's a look through the microscope at the life teeming in ordinary water. All images courtesy of the Nikon Small World Contest.
- The head of the larval form of Hydropsyche angustipennis (a caddisfly, a small, moth-like critter) looks surreal and dangerous under the microscope. In real life they're small, about half an inch long -- and squirming around in everyday freshwater ponds. These images all come from the Nikon Small World photo contest -- which needs you! Help pick the popular winner from all the great photos by visiting www.nikonsmallworld.com.read moreFabrice Parais / DREAL de Basse-NormandieShare
- Bryozoa -- often cutely called moss animals -- are filter feeders that strain food particles out of the water using a retractable "crown" of tentacles, seen beautifully here. Don't worry, though: They're so small they're almost invisible.read moreJocelyn Cheng / Rochester Institute of TechnologyShare
- A detailed look at the cell wall of a single-celled organism called a Paramecium caudatum. The creature is covered with tiny hair-like projections used for movement; here you can see details of the surface area those hairs, called cilia, connect to.read moreSven Gould / Heinrich-Heine-University DüsseldorfShare
- Artemia salina (you probably know it as a brine shrimp) drifts in a drop of water. The creatures are more familiar than you think: They're packaged and sold as Sea-Monkeys -- though the cartoons on the package bear little resemblance to the brine shrimp.read moreViktor Sykora / Institute of Pathophysiology, First Medical Faculty, Charles UniversityShare
- A microscopic Radiolarian -- a tiny ameboid creatures with a solid mineral skeleton. The creatures are diverse, and ancient: Radiolarians have existed since the Paleozoic era, and have evolved into a wild diversity of shapes during their 600-million-year history.read moreRaymond Sloss / Northamptonshire Natural History SocietyShare
- The 5-day-old head of a zebrafish, photographed through a unique process that makes visible the fish's internal structures. The common freshwater fish (you often see them in home fish tanks) takes on strange colors thanks to this photography technique.read moreHideo Otsuna / University of Utah Medical Center, Department of Neurobiology and AnatomyShare
- An incredibly close dorsal view of Limnochares aquatica (otherwise known as a water mite) shows the surface microstructures, including a glandularium and two slit organs. Seen as a whole, the organism looks like a tick, though it's closer to a spider.read moreJan Michels / Institute of Zoology, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu KielShare
- Published25 Images
What Are You Swimming With?
Baby trout, water mites, bits of tentacles, and all sorts of other tiny living things litter the water we splash around in. Here's a look through the microscope at the life teeming in ordinary water. All images courtesy of the Nikon Small World Contest.
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