Hungry plant, peek-a-boo bat win crazy micro-photo contest [Gallery]
Psychedelic. Spooky. Hairy. Gorgeous.
The winners of the 2013 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition have just been announced, and they are awesome.
You can see the top 10 winning images in the gallery above.
Taking first place is the freaky and fascinating Day-Glo image of the humped bladderwort, a floating carnivorous plant that thrives on every continent in the world except for Antarctica.
In the winning image above, you are not looking at the entire plant, but rather its microscopic trap, where it digests its prey.
The humped bladderwort (best name for anything ever) snacks on micro-invertebrates. It sucks its prey into its trap just milliseconds after they touch little trigger hairs. The roots of those hairs are visible toward the center of the image. Those weird snowflake-looking things at the bottom are single-cell green alagae. The trap provides a comfy micro-environment for them.
The image was taken by Igor Siwanowicz, a neurobiologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus.
But don’t stop there! Continue clicking and you’ll find the black mastiff bat embryo --a creature that looks like it came from a Guillermo del Toro film. Smooth and white, it is in the “peek-a-boo” stage, meaning its wings have just grown long enough to cover its eyes.
There is also a stained section of a lily flower bud, two baby brother bugs, and an image of the usually colorless musculature of a transparent “glassworm” larva.
This is the 10th year of the Olympus BioScapes competition. Competitors can enter any image of a human, plant, or animal captured through a light telescope. The entries are judged based both on aesthetics and the science they depict, according to a release.
I love micro-photography. LOVE IT! If you do too, you should follow me on Twitter.
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