- Every year, Nikon hosts an awe-inspiring competition called The Small World in Motion.
- This is a collection of videos from underneath a microscope's lens, showing the unseen world.
- This year among the winners was a colorful coral polyp emerging into the world, tardigrades the most indestructible creatures on the planet and a plankton filled with swimming parasites.
- Check out all the winners and honorable mentions in Nikons gallery.
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Following is a transcript of the video.
Narrator: You're looking at a tardigrade, the world's most indestructible organism. And this is a squid tentacle. Most of us think we know what the world around us looks like, but that same world looks very different underneath a microscope. This is the unseen world
This video was captured by biologist Philippe Laissue using a custom-built low-light microscope, and it won first prize in Nikon's Small World in Motion competition. It's a staghorn coral polyp emerging into the world. You can even see the pink algae living inside the coral. The polyp images are part of a study to help find ways to protect and conserve coral in the future.
But the second-place winner had a very different approach. That is a dead copepod, a type of marine plankton, and it's filled with parasites erratically swimming about. They gruesomely make their way into the plankton and consume it from within.
In third place was this hypnotizing video. Here you can see a Stylonychia, a microorganism often found in fresh water. It's creating a water vortex with its cilia, but this isn't just for fun. That vortex will, in fact, help them catch their next delicious meal.
Coming in at fourth place is nature's most indestructible creature, the tardigrade, and specifically tardigrades from a freshwater spring in Florida. Here, two tardigrades are seen eating alive a rather unlucky third one. Talk about a rough day.
Now, in fifth place is this detailed footage of a mouse embryo. You can see the progression of neural tubes folding and closing. And with this research, scientists can begin to understand how mammalian tissues and organs form.
But that's not all. There were hundreds of video entries this year, and with them were plenty of honorable mentions worthy of a place on the podium. No, these iron filings haven't come alive and choreographed a dance routine; they are moving in the presence of a magnetic field.
Speaking of dance moves, this little critter has the worm nailed, mainly because it is one: the larvae of a Polychaeta worm. And that wasn't the only strange-looking creature to feature in the list. This is the skeleton shrimp. Similar to a caterpillar, it moves through the water by bending and stretching its body.
Then you have the stink bug, seen here entering the world from its shell. It's perhaps the start of a fruitful career bringing pungent smells into the world. These are longfin inshore squid tentacles, and those spots are chromatophores, or pigment cells. Squids can change these cells in seconds, enhancing their camouflage. This psychedelic video is a frog cell, and rippling across it traveling in waves is protein activity, which help get the cell ready for future cell division, which, believe it or not, is exactly what's happening here. That's a whole bunch of muscle tissue cells dividing.
All these videos were finalists of the 2019 Small World in Motion competition. And with the constant advancements in technology, you can only imagine how awe-inspiring the microscopic images of the future will be.
SEE ALSO: Award-winning footage of the microscopic world around us