Micro Life

Micro Life combines graceful design and beautiful photography to provide an elegant introduction to microscopic nature.

Explore the everyday miracle of the microscopic world.

With spectacular macro photography and microscope images, this book reveals a hidden, living world full of intricate structures beyond the naked eye. Included are the tiniest insects and spiders, but looking deeper, you will discover truly microscopic creatures—even bacteria and viruses.

Earth is home to more microbes, and more different types of microbes, than any other living organism. Bacteria on Earth outweigh humans by 1,100 to 1, and without them, all world ecosystems would collapse. This book reveals this vital, unseen realm, but it includes large life forms too, in extreme close-up, so that you can wonder at the beauty of a pollen grain, a butterfly egg, the spore of a fungus, and the nerve cell of a human.

The spectacular imagery in Micro Life exploits cutting-edge technology, such as focus-stacked macro photographs, as well as micrographs (microscope images) including scanning electron micrographs. Illustrations nearby explain the science—from the workings of an insect's eye to how a plant "breathes" through its leaves. The biology builds into a reference on how life works—and how all organisms, however small, solve the basic problems of movement, reproduction, energy, communication, and defence.

Micro Life is a beautiful and surprising look at the natural world.