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Pin-ItThis movie of a microscopic Spathidium ciliate feeding on a Vorticella ciliate beautifully illustrates the relationship between hunter and predator, even in the microscopic world of ciliate creatures. A phase contrast movie such as this requires imaging skill and patience since it can take quite some time to capture a predator in such a moment and skill to be ready to capture it visually when the opportunity presents itself.
2020 Small World in Motion Competition
Honorable Mention
Spathidium ciliate feeding on Vorticella ciliate
Andrei Savitsky
- Location
- Cherkassy, Ukraine
- Technique
- Phase Contrast
- Magnification
- 20X (Objective Lens Magnification)
Honorable Mention
Ciliate (Frontonia)
Rogelio Moreno
- Location
- Panama, Panama
- Technique
- Differential Interference Contrast
- Magnification
- 20X (Objective Lens Magnification)
Mr. Moreno’s winning movie is that of a ciliate, shown digesting microalgae. The differential interference contrast (DIC) illumination technique shows the internal workings beautifully and is key to giving the movie the distinctive blue background.
Honorable Mention
Endocardium, cells lining the heart chambers, in a beating heart of a living, 2 day old zebrafish (Danio rerio)
Anjalie Schlaeppi
- Affiliation
- Morgridge Institute for Research
Department of Medical Engineering
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
- Technique
Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy (SPIM)
- Magnification
- 16X (Objective Lens Magnification)
Anjalie Schlaeppi is a biologist working on early development of the zebrafish heart, specifically to better understand how the early embryonic heart pumps blood before valves have developed in the organ. This in vivo (in a live organism) movie was taken on a custom-built light sheet microscope using simultaneous 2-color acquisition. This rarely seen phenomena clearly shows the endocardium (the thin membrane that lines the inside of heart valves) repetitively contracting, effectively creating the pumping action before the valves have developed.
Top 20
Honorable Mentions
Judges
Dr. Dylan Burnette
Assistant Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology Vanderbilt University
Burnette has been using high resolution microscopy to study cells for over 20 years. His laboratory at Vanderbilt University focuses on how cells grow and divide. He is interested in how these processes contribute to the function of heart muscle. He trained as a graduate student with Dr. Paul Forscher at Yale University and as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Burnette has placed in the Nikon Small World competition eleven times.
Samantha Clark
Photo Editor National Geographic
Clark works on stories about science and the environment. She previously worked on NPR’s photo team and at Pier 24 Photography. Before working in visuals, she was a reporter and radio producer based in the Bay Area of San Francisco.
Sean Greene
Graphics and Data Journalist The Los Angeles Times
Greene covers science, the environment and medicine. He started working for The Los Angeles Times in 2014 and specializes in combining the powers of visual storytelling and the internet to tell meaningful and memorable stories. He’s reported on native oysters, bugs and frog tongues, and helped develop projects such as an interactive map of the Milky Way, a tracker of coronavirus cases in California and a data analysis of the dialogue in the Star Wars movies.
Dr. Christophe Leterrier
Group Leader Institute of Neurophysiopathology at CNRS and Aix-Marseille University
An engineer by training, Dr. Leterrier turned to cell biology and neurobiology for his Ph.D. He studies how neurons are organized at the cellular level and how they differentiate, then build and maintain their incredibly complex arborization. Since 2017, he has led the NeuroCyto lab in Marseille where he applies advanced microscopy techniques to directly observe molecular assemblies at the nanoscale inside neurons.
Ariel Waldman
Chair of the External Council NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program
Waldman led an expedition to Antarctica to film microscopic life under the ice. She is the co-author of a National Academy of Sciences report on the future of human spaceflight and the author of the book What’s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been There. Waldman is the global director of Science Hack Day, a National Geographic Explorer, a member of the San Francisco Microscopical Society, and received an honoree from the Obama White House as a Champion of Change in citizen science.
