Microscopic Diatoms

Diatoms are the bottom of the food chain. Everything eats them. They make energy from sunlight, using chlorophyll, which makes them a plant. But they also eat decaying matter and one species has been seen eating a living bug smaller than itself, so I guess they are also an animal. And, they move on their own, they can scoot right along.

These are dead though, taken from a jar of pond water that had gone bad. The shells are made of silica, so they do not rot, and even have been found in amber and as fossilized rock.

Diatoms are everywhere. They are in the dirt of your yard, in every creek, stream, river, pond, lake and in the oceans around the world. That probably makes them the most successful life form on the planet.

All of these are taken with a Canon T1i on a Nikon microscope at about 200x at the sensor. Most are cropped a little bit.

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Fascinating images! Thanks for sharing them.

Thanks for looking Hugh. If you want to see a live one acting like a bull dozer, check this out.

crazy cool!

Thanks for looking Andy. They are cool looking, but also fun to watch as they move around on the slide under the scope. The video shows one that is quite entertaining.

thanks for the biology lesson. I must have slept through class that day...

I have seen some pics of these elsewhere, they are fascinating.

Thanks for sharing,
-Jim

Thanks Jim. These things are really, really small. I should have added a measurement, but even that doesn't give a real feel for how tiny these are. If one of these got in your eye, it wouldn't even make you blink. They are used in toothpaste, as pool filter media, they are in everything, as dust blown from continent to continent, they fall out of the sky and are in our clothes and hair and just everywhere. There is so much more to our world that we just can't see, that it's simply mind boggling.