This month’s post is chock full of images! From Earth Day to our Image of the Year Award gallery, you showed an appreciation for a wide range of specimens captured under the microscope.

In April, we celebrated Earth Day with a beautiful selection of some of nature’s smallest wonders from an assortment of microscopists.

Images left to right, top to bottom: 1) Snail image courtesy of Håkan Kvarnström. 2) Copepod image courtesy of Anne Algar. 3) Green sea anemone image courtesy of Damon Tighe. 4) Micrasterias image courtesy of Håkan Kvarnström. 5) Living fossil (horsetail grass) image courtesy of Olivier Leroux. 6) Old man's beard flower image courtesy of Viktor Sýkora. 7) Oak lace bug image courtesy of Dr. Igor Siwanowicz.

After receiving an overwhelming number of stunning submissions, we were pleased to announce the winners of our 2021 Global Image of the Year (IOTY) competition in April.

The global winning image of our 2021 Image of the Year Award was captured by Jan Martinek. The image shows an Arabidopsis thaliana flower with pollen tubes growing through the pistil. The flower tissues were chemically cleared to become transparent, while the pollen tubes were stained with aniline blue (yellow fluorescence) in order to be seen.

Image courtesy of Jan Martinek (Czech Republic). 2021 IOTY global winner. Captured using an Olympus fluorescence microscope.

It’s no surprise that the remaining winners made it into the top images this month as well. These excellent images are the regional winners of our 2021 Global Image of the Year Award.

2021 IOTY regional winners (left to right): 1) Americas winner Ivan Radin (USA) imaged moss Physcomitrium patens protonemal cells. 2) Asia-Pacific winner Daniel Han (Australia) imaged fern sori capsules with spores bursting out. 3) EMEA winner Vasilis Kokkoris (the Netherlands) captured the multinucleate spores of a soil fungus.

This colorful selection of images received honorable mentions from our panel of jurors. For full details on all the 2021 winners and honorable mentions, visit our Image of the Year page.

2021 IOTY honorable mentions (left to right, top to bottom): 1) Di Lu (China). 2) Yujun Chen (USA). 3) Mingyue Jia (China). 4) David Maitland (UK). 5) Layra Cintron-Rivera (USA). 6) Igor Siwanowicz (USA). 7) Yayun Wang (China).

Do you ever get the feeling that you're being watched? Ants have compound eyes, meaning each eye is composed of hundreds of individual units called ommatidia!

Image courtesy of Leonardo Capradossi. Captured with an Olympus 20X LMPlanFL objective.

To see more images like these, be sure to follow us on Instagram at @olympuslifescience.

Interested in sharing your own images? Visit our image submission site.