It's despised by flyfishers everywhere. It's a blight on the ecosystem of the trout stream. And it's coated the bottom of the Esopus with a foul goop with all the charm of a wad of wet toilet paper. How could rock snot ever be beautiful?
Most people tend to prefer "charismatic megafauna" like tigers and wild mustangs to microbes. But scientists, especially the biological variety, are generally blessed with more catholic tastes in organismal beauty. Science writer Jennifer Frazer -- proprietor of The Artful Amoeba, a blog dedicated to the loveliness of biodiversity -- recently discovered another side to the oft-maligned Didymosphenia geminata:
With the lines of a Stradivarius and the detailing of a Fabergé egg, this baby is a microscopic work of art. If only its macroscopic manifestations could be so beautiful. As you may have guessed, it is a diatom (as covered here), a microscopic glass house (literally (littorally?) made of silicon dioxide) enclosing a little photosynthesizing alga.
Scanning electron micrograph of D. geminata by USGS scientist Sarah Spaulding, published in Wikimedia Commons. Full disclosure: Frazer's a fellow graduate of the science writing program I got a master's degree from in '08. Go Tech.
