Chennai: I am looking at a short clip of two walrus-like pink creatures seemingly floating over a shapeless splash of green. Several other tiny semi-transparent beings whoosh around this green weed. This video of tardigrades (whose body resembles a walrus), an eight-legged micro animal just 0.5 mm in length is fascinating. They appear to crawl and float, their minute legs shaking and wiggling as they move.
Captured by macrophotography enthusiasts, Martin Kaae Kristiansen from Denmark, the biomedical student is passionate about snapping images and videos of a world impossible to see with our naked eye. Martin is one of many science-lovers on Instagram who share high resolution and jaw-dropping images of specimens taken from their labs. Like Ant-Man exploring the quantum realm through atoms, electrons and micro-viruses, Martin uses his microscope to capture lives of tiny organisms and shares them on social media.
Tiny world
‘Each time, I get blown away by new, almost alien-like world invisible to our eyes,’ he says over email to News Today. “I chose the name “My Microscopic World” (his Instagram profile name) because all the samples I look at are from my world around me.” Like for example, the video of tardigrades were taken from a water sample found in his garden!
His YouTube channel has mesmerizing clips of organisms that hides in our food, bed bugs thriving on our cot, and even flowers. “We are always told that there are all these microorganisms all around us, and how stuff works on a small scale, but we never get to see these things,” he says. “So, I try to show people how things look and work under a microscope.”
Caught snapping
Martin explains how he finds a subject. He says preparation differs depending on the specimen type. He takes a dead insect, glues it to a piece of wire which helps him angle the way he wants. Sometimes, Martin takes a jar, fills it with vegetation, dead leaves, algae and water, transfers them to a petri dish and starts looking around. “When I find something interesting, I transfer it to a microscope slide with a micro-pipette to get an isolated clip of it,” he says.
Challenges
Sounds easy but Martin does face challenges. “When I find a fitting subject, the hardest part is to be patient,’ he writes. ‘The microorganisms often move in an unpredictable way and is hard to get good footage.” He adds, “Another challenge is that I have to identify all the stuff I see. It sometimes gets difficult when I find an organism I have never seen before but I usually get help from other microscopists.” Martin highly recommends beginners to find a Facebook or Reddit group and follow different photographers on Instagram to get inspiration on samples to take and how to prepare them.
Martin claims that his hobby helped him discover two new species of tardigrade that haven’t been seen in Denmark before. “This has been confirmed by the museum of natural history in Denmark and an expert in Poland,” he writes. “It is not something huge, but it shows that you do not have to be a scientist to make discoveries and explore new parts of the world around you.”
As I end this article, I think about organisms living unperturbed on my laptop keys. What are they doing? Martin’s microscope may let me know.