Things we find pretty: plankton, plants, and potatoes. Check out this month’s most popular images to see how even everyday items can become beautiful when looked at under a microscope. 

If you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach someone to fish, they capture a beautiful assortment of plankton using a plankton net in Sagami Bay, Japan. We spy diatoms, copepods, zooplankton, and more. What an incredible example of microscopic life within a sample!

Image courtesy of @co_micro. Captured on an Olympus BH2 microscope.

Jan Martinek, a plant cell biologist at Charles University in Prague and the 2021 Global Image of the Year winner, took over our Instagram account this month for a Takeover Week and got up close and personal with his favorite topic: plants. The images were so stunning that four of our top five images this month were from his takeover! 

The top image from the takeover shows the surface of the Atriplex leaf covered with tiny globular trichomes, which gives the leaf its frosted look.

Visit our Instagram to see the remaining images!

Image courtesy of Jan Martinek, 2021 Global Image of the Year winner. Captured with autofluorescence in UV excitation light and focus stacking using an Olympus AX70 microscope.

Kate Murphy finds love everywhere. We’re beginning to think we should change the H in H&E stain from “hematoxylin” to “heart.” This lovely capture is a tissue sample from a human colon.

Image courtesy of Kate Murphy. Captured using an Olympus BX40 microscope.

With autumn approaching, we’re already thinking about all the leaves we’re going to have to rake. These images make us appreciate the beauty of their vein structures instead of dwelling on the hard work to clean them up. Ilex aquifolium, also known as holly, is a species of flowering plant in the family Aquifoliaceae, native to western and Southern Europe, Northwest Africa, and Southwest Asia.

Image courtesy of @nanoscape. Captured on an Olympus SLIDEVIEW™ VS200 research slide scanner. 

When we think of potatoes, we often think of them as being bland, but this image of a potato tuber is nothing but! Here we see the storage parenchyma cells along with starch granules (pink). Who knew potatoes could be so pretty? 

Image courtesy of Cetinbas-Genc, PhD. Captured using an Olympus CH20 microscope.