These Beautiful Microscope Photos Capture Tiny Pests, Spores, Sensory Neurons and Sunflower Hairs

Nikon has announced the winners of its 51st annual photomicrography competition

October 17, 2025

insect on a grain of rice — First-place winner: rice weevil (*Sitophilus oryzae*) on a grain of rice Zhang You

The list of winners for this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition has finally been released, and the contest’s talented photographers once again wow viewers with fantastical images of everything from tropical fern spores to heart muscle cells.

Now in its 51st year, the competition honors exceptional photography through a microscope.

“A photomicrograph is a technical document that can be of great significance to science or industry,” reads the competition description. “But a good photomicrograph is also an image whose structure, color, composition and content is an object of beauty, open to several levels of comprehension and appreciation.”

The announcement of this year’s 20 winners comes just a few weeks after Nikon Instruments, Inc. revealed the winners of the 15th Nikon Small World in Motion Video Competition, which highlights movies captured through a microscope.

Zhang You of the Entomological Society of China took first place with an image of a rice weevil—an agricultural pest—on a grain of rice. The insect’s wings are completely extended, and it’s covered in what look like tiny white hairs as it seems to stare straight ahead.

“I had observed rice weevils in grains before, but never one with its wings spread,” You, who participated in the competition for the first time, says in a statement. “This one was naturally preserved on a windowsill, perhaps in a final attempt to escape. Its tiny size makes manually preparing spread-wing specimens extremely difficult, so encountering it was both serendipitous and inspiring.”

You also secured this year’s 15th place with an image of a geometer moth laying eggs.

Key takeaways: What is photomicrography?

Photomicrography is the art of capturing photographs of microscopic subjects, with the help of a microscope.
Nikon's Small World Photomicrography Competition is considered "the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope."

Igor Siwanowicz, a biochemist and neurobiologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, came in fifth place with a colorful image of the spores of a small tropical fern and also snagged eighth place with a photo of mallow pollen and fungus. The veteran photomicrographer has placed in Nikon’s Small World Competition at least 18 times, and has a soft spot for photographing praying mantises.

“I don’t love writing, but I love taking photographs. Other scientists can see my work and research interests through my photos, and it’s a really great way to find collaborators,” Siwanowicz says in a Nikon Masters of Microscopy: The People Behind the Lens post.

In seventh place, Stella Whittaker, a former research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, captured sensory neurons with tubulin and actin (two proteins). “Really honored to have an image I captured while at NIH be selected [as] the 7th-place finisher in the Nikon Small World competition,” Whittaker writes in a social media post.

Marek Miś, a biologist and photographer from Poland, secured 11th place with an image of sunflower trichomes, hair-like appendages on plants that, in this case, look like multicolored crab legs.

In an interview with Our Narratives from 2023, Miś explained that he has been interested in nature from a young age, particularly “the world of small things.” After his father gifted him a camera when he was 12, he tells the outlet, “I mainly photographed nature, in particular insects and flowers. This is how I started my adventure in photography. At that time, I didn’t even think about microphotography, I didn’t even have a microscope.” That eventually changed thanks to a book about microbes that so obsessed a young Miś that he built his first microscope himself.

You’s first-place winner is the lead image of this article. See the images captured by the contest’s second- through 11th-place winners below.