See a stunning world invisible to the naked eye

This dorsal view of a live juvenile zebrafish won first prize in this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. To achieve the otherworldly effect, researcher Daniel Castranova at the National Institutes of Health, assisted by colleague Bakary Samasa, tagged the fish’s lymphatic vessels (orange) and scales (blue) with fluorescent proteins and stitched together more than 350 individual frames.

German photographer Daniel Knop stacked five images of a clownfish embryo to illustrate stages of its development—from hours after fertilisation to hours before hatching.

This rainbow collection of combs is actually the surface of a freshwater snail’s tongue, or radula, which is covered in tiny teeth used to rasp food down to a digestible size. The picture was taken by Igor Siwanowicz at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

A soil fungus spore with multiple nuclei was captured by Canadian scientists Vasileios Kokkoris, Franck Stefani, and Nicolas Corradi. The spore is surrounded by ghostly branches of ever-growing fungal fibres called hyphae.

Most moths have eyes coated in a nanostructure that sucks in light and prevents reflection, which makes them stealthy migrators. Taken by Indonesian photographer Ahmad Fauzan, the image shows one of these dark optical globes on a Bogong moth as well as its fuzzy head and curled proboscis.

Colourful Klimtian beads of pollen cluster on the anther of a delicate Hebe plant, as assembled by Robert Markus and Zsuzsa Markus of the University of Nottingham.

Jason Kirk of the Baylor College of Medicine captured a brightly stained nucleus (cyan) surrounded by threads of microtubules (orange) in a human cell.

Re-envisioned in black-and-white, this image of an autofluorescent chameleon embryo was compiled by Allan Carrillo-Baltodano and David Salamanca of Queen Mary University of London. Fully developed chameleons are able to vary their coloration and pattern with light-reflecting crystals in their skin cells.

The hippocampus of the human brain is largely responsible for memory and learning. This image from Jason Kirk and Quynh Nguyen of the Baylor College of Medicine shows two adjacent hippocampal neurons connected by spindly synapses, ready to do some remembering.

The lumpy Daphnia magna, or water flea, is a small crustacean often used as an experimental organism because of its transparent shell and asexual reproduction. This image, a second winning entry from Ahmad Fauzan, depicts the head of one of these aquatic animals.

Like skeleton fingers, tendrils of red algae stretch out as if to grasp something, as captured by Tagide deCarvalho of the University of Maryland.

Austrian photographer Robert Viethaler stacked images to depict one strand of human hair, tied in a knot.

Like an abstraction of a Georgia O’Keefe painting, crystals that formed after heating an ethanol, water, and amino acid solution delicately twist and flower around each other in this image by New York photographer Justin Zoll.

A leaf roller weevil, protected by a textured and reflective shell, climbs on a plant in this result from Turkish photographer Ozgur Kerem Bulur.

An asexually reproducing ringworm (Chaetogaster diaphanus) forms a chain of daughters in this image, captured by Argentinian scientists Eduardo Zattara and Alexa Bely.

This iridescent net of interlocking and twisting filaments is actually something quite ordinary: a nylon stocking, minutely examined and reimagined by Russian photographer Alexander Klepnev. This is the only winning image not of the natural world.

Anne Algar of the United Kingdom stacked images to create this luminescent collage of a developing water boatman, an aquatic insect found all over the world.

What looks like thousands of small feathers—but are actually soft scales—coat the delicate wing of an Atlas moth in this picture from California photographer Chris Perani.

Jan Michels of the University of Kiel in Germany took this image of the tessellated silica cell wall of a marine diatom, or microalgae. Diatoms generate more than 20 percent of the oxygen produced on Earth each year.

The ghoulishly technicolour skeleton of a short-tailed fruit bat embryo was captured by Dorit Hockman and Vanessa Chong-Morrison of the University of Cape Town.