Beautiful and dramatic scenes unfold around

us every day, but many of them are too small to see with the naked eye, such as zebrafish embryo development, the wriggling of a newborn octopus as it erupts from an egg, or a mosquito as it is attacked and overwhelmed by fungus spores.


Those breathtaking moments — and many more — are spectacularly displayed in video clips that were recently honored by the Nikon Small World in Motion Digital Video Competition, an annual contest that celebrates movies and time-lapse sequences shot through an optical-light microscope.