2011 Olympus BioScapes winners (special photography)

The 2011 Olympus BioScapes competition brings the beauty of micro-organisms out of the lab. Here is a gallery of our favourite images from the contest, including petite plankton, dinky Drosophila and miniscule mould spores.

Strawberry ovaries (click to enlarge image)

 These fruit-fly ovaries look almost like strawberries hanging from a vine due to the background staining, which has coloured them red. Gunnar Newquist of the University of Nevada, Reno, took seventh place with this image, which highlights the muscular and neural structure of the Drosophila melanogaster reproductive system through fluorescence microscopy.

(Image: Gunnar Newquist)

Hairy wheels (click to enlarge image)

 The fast-moving cilia, or hairs, that give this rotifer – "wheel bearer" – the illusion of rotating wheels are frozen in time in this winning image from the 2011 Olympus BioScapes competition. The cilia on the lobes of the rotifer Floscularia ringens gather food particles from the surrounding water and direct them toward its mouth. Charles Krebs of Issaquah, Washington, used a technique called differential interference contrast microscopy to make this image of the creature sitting in a self-made tube constructed from detritus.
(Image: Charles Krebs)

Art or amoeba? (click to enlarge image)

It's hard to imagine a skeleton that looks as beautiful as the single-celled radiolarian does in this image, which received honourable mention. The picture, created by Christopher Jackson of Bern, Switzerland, captures the mobile amoeba's mineral skeleton through the bright-field imaging technique with extended depth of field. These protozoans are found throughout the ocean and their skeletons cover the ocean floor, making up radiolarian ooze.
(Image: Christopher B. Jackson)

Grass cut (click to enlarge image)

 A cross-section of a marsh grass of the genus Juncus is shown here emitting light naturally in a process called autofluorescence. The chlorophyll on the outside of the leaf can be seen in red in the image, which was shot by Jan Martinek of the Czech Republic. The vascular bundles – structures that transport water and minerals through the plant – are shown in blue. This image also received honourable mention in the competition.
(Image: Jan Martinek)

Fluorescent fungus (click to enlarge image)

 Slime mould is no ordinary mould - it's a fungus that also has animal genes. Although they possess no nervous system, slime moulds have been shown to navigate mazes and communicate with one another. The spores of the slime mould Physarum leucophaeum are seen here in a fluorescent micrograph from Dalibor Matýsek of VŠB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. His image received honourable mention and shows off the beautiful patterns and structures of this strange creature.
(Image: Dalibor Matýsek)