[imagesource: Eugenijus Kavaliauskas/Nikon Small World]

The microscopic world is a mystery, and maybe it should stay that way.

Okay, no, it’s just ants that you don’t want to see up close, trust me. The rest is pretty impressive and awe-inspiring.

To be clear, what you’re looking at up top is indeed the face of an ant.

An ant. That is what an ant walks around looking like, on your kitchen counter and bedside table. I know, shocking.

Even more shocking is the fact that there are 20 quadrillion individual ants walking around planet Earth as we speak. I feel surrounded by horror.

The Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition does a wonderful job of helping us dial into the details of the microscopic world around us, showcasing talented photographers and their amazing technological skills, except in this instance.

Wildlife photographer Eugenijus Kavaliauskas took that shot of the highly magnified ant photo, and actually, he can get lost with it.

He is only saved by the fact that we are so near to Halloween, so I guess, it is somewhat appropriate that we all know what an ant face looks like now:

Image from a horror movie? Nope. That’s the very real face of an ant.
An ant.
Now you have to think about that all night. pic.twitter.com/HOWLTlnfJ1

— Rebekah McKendry, PhD (@RebekahMcKendry) October 17, 2022

“It looks like something that crawled out of an orc pit in Middle-earth,” noted CNET.

There are other Small World highlights that can keep you in a spooky mood, like this equally unsettling image of a fly tucked in under the chin of a tiger beetle, shot by Murat Ozturk who came in 10th:

Or how about this ghost-like anemone larva found in marine plankton, taken by Wim van Egmond of the Micropolitan Museum:

The cute phantom-like creatures earned an honourable mention.

The crowing image for 2022 went to Grigorii Timin of the University of Geneva for his shot of an embryonic hand of a Madagascar giant day gecko:

Timin had to photograph the hand using a confocal microscope, which he then had to merge with hundreds of images, which overall provides a thorough look at the gecko’s nerves, bones, tendons, ligaments, skin, and blood cells, per Gizmodo:

“This particular image is beautiful and informative, as an overview and also when you magnify it in a certain region, shedding light on how the structures are organized on a cellular level,” said Timin in a statement provided by the contest.

This fourth-place image, taken by Andrew Posselt, showcases a member of the “daddy long legs” species, which are actually closer relatives to mites and other arachnids than they are to spiders:

Changing up the Halloween theme is this trippy-looking midge larva collected from a freshwater pond and shot using polarised light. It was an honourable mention, taken by Karl Gaff from Dublin, Ireland:

The fifth-place winner was Alison Pollack thanks to her shot of a genus of slime mould known as Lamproderma:

The eight-place was taken by Nathanaël Prunet, a biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, showing the tip of a species of red algae:

Another honourable mention was taken by Laurent Formery of the University of California, Berkeley, depicting a two-month-old juvenile sea star of the species colloquially known as sea bats or bat stars:

Be sure to visit the full Nikon Small World winners gallery where you can spend hours absorbed in the microscopic world.

[sources:cnet&gizmodo]