This colorful collage is actually a closeup of the common East-coast US fern, Polypodium virginianum. This image was created using a laser scanning confocal microscope by Igor Siwanowicz of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It took third prize in the 2012 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition.
Siwanowicz's earlier macro photography included startling images of insects fighting each other. Siwanowicz is a Polish photographer and research specialist Howard Hughes Medical Institute who has bred his own insects and photographed them extensively. "My [research] project involves describing the neural circuits responsible for generating pray capture behavior in dragonflies, but I find it irresistible to study other morphological adaptations that make those insects such formidable predators," he explains.
This recent image uses a much more cooperative subject. It shows a cluster of spore-filled sporangia (the balled structures, which sit on the underside of ferns' fronds) interspersed with specialized protective hairs called paraphyses. Siwanowicz says his prize-winning photograph was his first ever of a plant specimen:
"Not such a long time ago I decided that my specialization was way too narrow and by neglecting a whole kingdom of life I'm losing the opportunity to take interesting, if more abstract, images. I took a walk around the grounds of my institute and brought back several leaves of local ferns; I was recalling vaguely that spore clusters have an interesting morphology, but didn't quite expect what I've seen under the microscope. All those swollen bottle-like structures looked weirdly out of place there. To be perfectly honest, I had to educate myself to fully comprehend what was I seeing in the image I took. I vaguely remembered images of sporangia from my high school botany classes, but the bulbous red structures dominating the image puzzled me. After doing some research (thanks, Google!) I came to the conclusion that the structures are in fact specialized hairs called paraphyses. P. virginianym is an evergreen species; the hairs probably protect the spores from the elements."