Plankton shells

Here, shells molted by plankton display autofluorescence—no blacklight here; this is all natural. The plankton molts were floating in seawater in a dish and imaged by laser scanning confocal microscopy.

This image received an Honorable Mention in the 2012 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition.

Christine Farrar, Jo-Ann Leong, Pam Omidyar and Ruth Gates, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Kaneohe, Hawaii, USA