Up close, the smallest creatures can look like monsters from a horror film. Worms with rings of fangs, mites with clawed legs and insect faces covered in plates and bristles all hide in plain sight around us, and sometimes on us. The images below were mostly made with scanning electron microscopes, which reveal surface detail at magnifications of hundreds or thousands of times. Most of the colours were added afterwards.
Each picture is introduced below with what it shows, how big the animal really is and why its strange features make sense. Seen that way, the "terrifying" faces turn out to be beautifully engineered tools for eating, gripping and surviving.
How these microscope images are made
A scanning electron microscope (SEM) does not use light. It sweeps a fine beam of electrons across a specimen and records the electrons that bounce off its surface. Each point becomes a pixel, so the raw image is always in black, white and grey. The beam gives an unusually deep zone of sharp focus, which is why SEM pictures look so three-dimensional.
Biological specimens are normally fixed, dried and coated with a very thin layer of metal such as gold so they do not build up an electrical charge in the vacuum of the microscope. Colour, when it appears, is false colour added by the scientist or artist to separate parts of the body or simply to make the image striking. So the red eyes of a wasp or the purple lenses of a mosquito are artistic choices, not what you would see through a magnifying glass. One image here, the chick embryo, was made with a light microscope instead.
Sea worms with jaws
Hydrothermal worm
Image: Philippe Crassous (via FEI)
The head of a worm from the deep sea, where hot, mineral-rich water gushes from vents in the ocean floor. French electron microscopist Philippe Crassous is known for SEM portraits of marine worms. The ring of tooth-like projections around the mouth helps grab food; species living near vents survive in some of the harshest conditions on Earth.
Marine worm
Image: Philippe Crassous (via FEI)
Seen head-on, this marine worm opens a mouth lined with serrated jaws. Many bristle worms (polychaetes) can push out their throat and jaws to seize prey, then pull them back in. The whole animal would be small enough to hide in a pinch of sand.
Marine worm, second view
Image: Philippe Crassous (via FEI)
Another worm by Crassous, false-coloured grey on blue. The long sensory feelers and short antennae on its head help it detect food and danger in the dark, and the folded skin behind them shows the segmented body typical of these worms.
Insect heads up close
Mosquito eye
Image: Oliver Meckes (via FEI)
A mosquito's compound eye at about 450 times magnification; the scale bar in the corner marks one tenth of a millimetre. Each purple dome is one ommatidium, a separate light-collecting unit, and together they give the insect a wide, mosaic view that is good at detecting movement. The yellow scales and hairs between the eyes are part of the head covering.
A wasp's head
Image: Eye of Science / Science Photo Library
The face of a small wasp, with jointed antennae, a finely sculpted head capsule and mandibles that work sideways like pincers. The red compound eyes are false colour. Eye of Science, the German team of Oliver Meckes and Nicole Ottawa, is behind many of the best-known coloured SEM images of insects.
The face of an ant
Image: Stephen Lyth, 2006
An ant's head in black and white, as the microscope records it. The mandibles, the base of the antennae and the dense hairs that sense touch and smell are all visible. Ants rely heavily on these hairs and their antennae, since many species see poorly.
Cleptoparasitic bee
Image: Jerome G. Rozen and Glenn Hall (via BioOne)
The head of a cleptoparasitic, or "cuckoo," bee, from research by bee specialist Jerome Rozen and colleague Glenn Hall; the scale bar shows half a millimetre. Cuckoo bees lay their eggs in other bees' nests. In many species the young larva is armed with sharp mandibles that it uses to kill the host's egg or larva and take over its food store.
Parasites that live on people and animals
A head louse clinging to a human hair
A head louse wrapped around a single human hair. Lice are only two or three millimetres long, and their claws are shaped to fit the width of a hair, which is why they are so hard to comb out. They feed on blood from the scalp and spread mainly through head-to-head contact, not dirty hair.
Swollen tick
Image: Eye of Science / Science Photo Library
A tick so full of blood that its body has become a balloon, with its small head and legs at the front. A feeding female can grow many times her original size over several days. Because ticks can spread infections such as Lyme disease, it is sensible to check skin after walks in long grass and remove ticks promptly; talk to a doctor if a rash or fever follows a bite.
Eyelash mite
Image: Eye of Science / Science Photo Library
A Demodex mite, the kind that lives in human hair follicles. Adults are 0.3 to 0.4 millimetres long with four pairs of stubby legs, and they live mostly on the face, around the nose, cheeks, forehead and eyelids, feeding on oily sebum. Most adults carry them without noticing. Large numbers are linked to skin and eyelid conditions such as rosacea and blepharitis, though whether the mites are cause or consequence is still debated.
Tiny survivors in water and moss
Water bear
Image: Oliver Meckes / Eye of Science
A tardigrade, or water bear, on a piece of moss. Usually around half a millimetre long, it walks on eight clawed legs with a slow, bear-like gait, which gave it its name when it was first described in 1773. When it dries out it can curl into a dormant "tun" state and survive extreme cold, heat, radiation and even exposure to space vacuum.
Water mite
Image: Nicole Ottawa / Eye of Science (via FEI)
A water mite, a tiny relative of spiders that lives in ponds and streams. The patterned shield on its back, the jointed legs fringed with swimming hairs and the mouthparts below are all visible here. Many water mites are predators of other small creatures, and their larvae often hitch rides on insects.
Larvae and embryos
Maggot
Image: Eye of Science / Science Photo Library
The front end of a fly larva. Maggots have no true legs or jaws; instead they use a pair of mouth hooks, seen here as small fangs, to rasp at food and pull themselves along. The rough bands around the body give grip as the larva wriggles.
Caterpillar
Image: Eye of Science / Science Photo Library
A caterpillar's face, with chewing mouthparts at the centre and several tiny simple eyes, called stemmata, arranged on each side of the head. Caterpillars see little more than light and shadow. The bristles across the head and body sense touch and can deter predators.
Embryonic zebrafish
Image: David McCarthy
The head of a developing zebrafish, with its open mouth and nostril pits giving it an oddly human expression. Zebrafish are among the most important animals in medical research because their embryos grow quickly outside the mother and are transparent, so scientists can watch organs form.
Chicken embryo
Image: Tomas Pais de Azevedo / Nikon Small World
A chick embryo photographed through a stereomicroscope at about six times magnification by Tomas Pais de Azevedo, then a biology student at the University of Lisbon. The large eye and the buds of the limbs are clear. The image received an Image of Distinction in the 2008 Nikon Small World competition and won its popular vote.
Why tiny creatures look so frightening
These pictures unsettle us because they remove every clue about size. With no hand, coin or leaf in the frame, a mite the width of a hair can fill the screen like a tank, and our brains read it as large and dangerous. Dramatic lighting, black backgrounds and bold false colour add to the effect.
The reality is mostly harmless and often useful. Mouth hooks, clawed legs and toothed jaws are adaptations for feeding and holding on at a scale where gripping a hair or a grain of sand is a matter of survival. Looking carefully at repeating patterns, like the lenses of an insect eye or the segments of a worm, shows how much order exists at a scale we rarely see.
For more images that change how ordinary things look, see Ordinary Things Seen Differently: A Gallery of Small Surprises.
Sources: Images by Philippe Crassous, Oliver Meckes and Nicole Ottawa (Eye of Science), Stephen Lyth, Jerome G. Rozen and Glenn Hall, David McCarthy and Tomas Pais de Azevedo, as credited above; compilation first seen on Memolition. Background: Wikipedia: Scanning electron microscope; Wikipedia: Tardigrade; Wikipedia: Demodex folliculorum; Nikon Small World: Chick embryo (2008).
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