An Antony van Leeuwenhoek original: Portrait of the Ash Tree as a Young Cross Section.

When it has a Water Flea Circus, a Rotifer Room, and a Radiolaria Lounge you know this blogger is going to love it, and the Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms is home to all these things. The website, proudly presented by the Institute for the Promotion of the Less Than One Millimetre, is the labor of love of Dutch artist Wim van Egmond.

If you just want the highlights, here’s a nice slide show by Wired Magazine.

Following in the steps (or perhaps slides) of his famous countryman and father of microbiology Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Wim has not only produced a great collection of microscopic photos, he’s got a great collection of microscopic photos in 3D, a technology sadly not available to the great microscopist. And as we know from our Avatar experience, everything’s better in 3D . . . .

You’ll need a cheap pair of red-blue glasses in order to experience the 3D. I highly recommend investing or procuring such, since there’s a lot of great 3D space images also getting tossed around the internet lately.

Antony (Antonie) van Leeuwenhoek (Lee-oo-ven-hoke Lay’-oon-hook — I think. Please correct me if I’m wrong, Jasper) is a guy you should know about if you read this blog. He was a Dutch cloth merchant who took up microscopy in the mid-1600s; met Peter the Great and may have known Johannes Vermeer (my favorite painter); and may have been the first human ever to see and draw microorganisms, which he called (delightfully) “animalcules”. He lived to be 90 — no small feat in the 17th century, and a reminder of how rugged humans can be even in the absence of antibiotics, toothpaste, text messages, etc., etc. He mastered a technique for making a small and optically excellent microscope that is essentially a melted bead of glass. It is so simple you can teach schoolchildren to make them in a few minutes, as protistologist Patrick Keeling has figured out how to do. Yet van Leeuwenhoek wanted to maintain his microbial monopoly so he could get the glory for his accomplishment (understandable but rather stifling to science, it must be said). So he seems to have let on like he spent hours in the kitchen grinding lenses to get his beautiful pictures. Hours. [Wipes dewy brow while letting out long-suffering sigh]

Above you see one of Van Leeuwenhoek’s actual drawings. It’s remarkably accurate (he certainly spent hours on that) and shows the cross section of a one-year old ash tree. The big holes are the vessel elements and the small holes are tracheids, the two chief cell types of wood (which is mostly xylem (zy’-lem)) in flowering plants. These cells move water and minerals when they are new, and once defunct, provide structural support. Thus, when you hold a piece of wood, you’re the holding the lignin and cellulose skeletons of tracheids and vessels.

You can see that early in the year, the tree made lots of big vessels for pumping water into swelling leaves, while later in the year the flow slowed. This annual variation in vessel/tracheid size is responsible for the growth rings you see in angiosperm (flowering) trees. Those big vessels are a flowering plant innovation that conifers lack, and may be partly responsible for their evolutionary success. It should also be said that vessel elements and tracheids are among the most beautiful (and abundant) tissue-class cells on the planet, thanks to their lignin-thickened decorations. See some more here and here and I believe in Fig. 1(?) in van Leeuwenhoek’s drawing above. Way cool!

Must get on top of getting a microscope. Must. Must.

I think you all know how I would answer that question.

Pollen from sunflower, morning glory, hollyhock, lily, primrose, and castor bean plants. 500X magnification; the bean-shaped pollen grain at lower left if 50 micrometers (μm) long. Believe it or not, these microbes are actually an entire plant -- the male gametophyte.

This blog is all about the variety of life, but part of that variety are the enormously different scales at which life can exist. You may know blue whales are the largest animals (ever, actually. Ever.), but they are not the largest organisms. Trees (aspen are notorious for this — one called Pando in Utah in paticular), fungi (remember the humongous fungus?), and perhaps a mediterranean sea grass called Posidonia oceanica can grow to many square kilometers courtesy their ability to grow asexually and keep at it for thousands of years. Life exists in a contiuum from these titans all the way down to the tiniest bacteria and archaea, the smallest of which are in the 200-400 nanometer range, round about the size of the measles virus.

Now the University of Utah has created an animation with a simple slider bar that takes you from coffee bean to carbon atom and back again. Check it out! Notice, for example, the amoeba (yay! Our site mascot!) approaches the size of the grain of salt and is visible to the naked eye when the animation is zoomed all the way out. If I were a bacterium or yeast cell, I’d cower too!

Notice also that mitochondria, the descendants of bacteria engulfed by ancestral eukaryotic cells (all cells except bacteria and archaea) billions of years ago, are actually slightly bigger than, but still more or less the same size as, E. coli. Notice that measles virus next to it — which gives the scale for the tiniest known cells mentioned above. Zoom in and out to compare this to the size of the amoeba or paramecium, and think about the fact they are both what we call “single-celled organisms”. Yet if the biggest amoeba or smallest bacterium had eyes, they probably wouldn’t be able to see each other. They are an order of magnitude (1000 times) different in size — and the difference is 10 times the difference between blue whales and us!

Don’t miss the question at the bottom either, which shows what amazing packers you boys are. A sample:

How can an X chromosome be nearly as big as the head of the sperm cell?

No, this isn’t a mistake. First, there’s less DNA (half as much, actually –jf) in a sperm cell than there is in a non-reproductive cell such as a skin cell. Second, the DNA in a sperm cell is super-condensed and compacted into a highly dense form. Third, the head of a sperm cell is almost all nucleus. Most of the cytoplasm has been squeezed out in order to make the sperm an efficient torpedo-like swimming machine.

Why do I get the feeling that last sentence will inordinately please the gentlemen out there? : )