See a tardigrade ride a worm in the world’s weirdest rodeo — September’s best science images
The month’s sharpest science shots — selected by Nature’s photo team.
Fearless hitchhiker. A baby tardigrade hitches a ride on the back of a nematode worm, one of its predators. Despite their miniature size, tardigrades are some of the toughest creatures around. They can survive extreme temperatures and the vacuum of space. And this particular tardigrade clearly hasn’t let the possibility of being eaten stop it from taking part in this tiny, epic rodeo. This microscopic video was captured by mechanical engineer Quinten Geldhof, and won fifth place in the 2024 Small World in Motion Competition.
Elusive orchid. The aptly named ghost orchid (Epipogium aphyllum) has been spotted in the United Kingdom for the first time in 15 years. Named for its white colouration and tendency to inhabit dark woodlands, the plant lives almost exclusively underground and gets its nutrients from fungi. The last sighting of the orchid, in 2009, occurred just one week after the species had been mistakenly declared extinct in Britain because no one had seen one for 22 years. The most recent sighting was by amateur botanist Richard Bate, who spent decades searching for the elusive flower.
Credit: Richard Bate
Credit: Richard Bate
Credit: CAMS/ECMWF. This video has no sound.
Credit: CAMS/ECMWF. This video has no sound.
The hole story. This 3D visualization, released on 16 September by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, to mark the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer, shows the development of the ozone hole over Antarctica this year. The ozone layer has been slowly healing since ozone-depleting substances were banned in the 1980s, but the hole still opens up each year during spring in the Southern Hemisphere. The hole appeared later than usual this year, owing to higher than usual stratospheric temperatures and slower winds in July and August, which disrupt the process of ozone depletion. It is unclear how this pattern will affect the ozone layer’s long-term recovery.
Stars and stripes. Bioluminescent plankton emit an otherworldly glow under the stars of the Southern Cross constellation. Astrophotographer Petr Horálek came across this “simply epic” scene on the northern shore of Medhufaru, an island in the Maldives. “As you walked on the beach, the plankton lit up like small torches, stuck to your legs and feet,” he said in his competition entry. “You could swim in the lagoon and see your movements illuminated by the plankton in the water. When a new wave hit the shore, it looked like blue lava.” The image was highly commended in the ‘skyscapes’ category of Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition — see below for a selection of other entries.
Credit: Petr Horalek
Credit: Petr Horalek
Credit: Ryan Imperio
Credit: Ryan Imperio
Credit: Mukund Raguram
Credit: Mukund Raguram
Credit: Fei Xue
Credit: Fei Xue
That’s a moray. This shot of a California moray eel (Gymnothorax mordax) won third place at Oceanographic’s Young Ocean Photographer of the Year competition. It was taken near San Diego, California, by conservation photographer Julian Jacobs on an early morning expedition to the intertidal zone, an area where the ocean meets the land between high and low tides. “I spent the blue hour and the transition to dawn with this eel, framing the shot with its reflection,” says Jacobs in his competition entry. The sighting was a lucky find: adult morays tend to stick to deeper water.
Ship shape. A 3D digital model of the RRS Discovery — the research ship that took explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica in the early twentieth century — is offering insights into the vessel’s construction. To create the ‘digital twin’, researchers used drones to capture video footage and laser scans of the ship and combined these with other 3D-mapping technologies to recreate every detail. Discovery is deteriorating in several places, including parts of the bow (pictured here), and the digital twin provides important information for those hoping to restore it.
Purple rain. This vivid violet sky was photographed just before Typhoon Bebinca made landfall near Shanghai, China, in mid-September. The typhoon was the strongest storm to hit Shanghai in 75 years, and also affected communities in the Philippines and Japan. Purple skies are often seen before large storms — the colours are created when unusually large amounts of moisture in the air affect the scattering of sunlight.
Rainbow heart. “In my lab, we are investigating how heart growth is influenced by the mechanical forces generated during heartbeats,” says Dylan Burnette, a cell biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who created this colourful microscope image of a zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryo heart. Zebrafish hearts have two chambers: a ventricle (right) and atrium (left). In this sample, the ventricle and atrium are positioned such that the cell nuclei — the bright colours — form a classic heart shape. The colours were added during post-processing using software, says Burnette, which allows “3D spatial information to be visualized in a 2D image, with different colours representing the varying depths of the nuclei”.
Mars on Earth. This barrel-shaped chamber is helping researchers to replicate weather patterns on the red planet. The Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments (DUSTIE) replicates atmospheric conditions on other planets — in this case, the carbon dioxide ice found in Mars’s southern hemisphere. NASA scientists used the chamber to recreate smaller versions of the spider-like cracks in the planet’s terrain that were first discovered in 2003. Researchers have long suspected that carbon dioxide ice helped to create these features, and DUSTIE experiments support this idea: simulations suggest that the soil on Mars absorbs heat from the Sun, causing the carbon dioxide ice above it to turn directly into gas. This process causes the ice to crack in the characteristic spider pattern.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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