A decomposing Chydorus water flea becomes a burst of motion as attached vorticella swirl slowly oozing cells into firework-like trails.
Image credit:Jess Holz
When Jess Holz was an undergraduate majoring in art with a minor in neuroscience, she discovered an unexpected new medium: microscopy. Her introduction came through her freshman biology course involving crickets’ chemosensory organs. It was here that she first worked with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and also examined subjects like iridescent butterfly wings.
Jess Holz showcases the beauty of plankton through microscopy and captures their movement through timelapse paintings.
Bruce Robert Wahl
Today, Holz is an electron microscopy research fellow at Boston University in neuroscientist Helen Barbas’s group. While she spends her weekdays capturing images for scientific research, her weekends are devoted to using various microscopy techniques to highlight her current muse, plankton.
“Plankton is alive, swimming, colorful, and just endless entertainment,” she said. Because the SEM—what Holz called “a bone-dry desert of death”—is inhospitable to her living subjects and hard to access for her art, she bought her own optical light microscope to look at plankton at her studio.
She collects her samples from local Boston water sources, including the Chandler pond, the Charles River, and the harbor, using a plankton net. Then, under the microscope, “Flagellates will swim in a helical path often, or a rotifer will create these feeding currents and pull the food to its mouth,” explained Holz. “It makes these large swirling vortices that look really good in time lapse.”
A large paramecium loops across the slide, propelled by thousands of beating hair-like cilia along its surface.
Jess Holz
She creates time-lapse “paintings” using darkfield, phase contrast, and differential interference contrast microscopy, then uses software she developed to trace the organisms’ movements over time. This transforms their trajectories into luminous lines, as seen in the image above.
As she samples from different water sources and seasons, she has observed cyanobacterial blooms, such as Anabaena blooms, from her samples from the Charles River. Other times, the samples are filled with filaments, like Asterionella. “There were all these star-shaped diatoms everywhere [under the microscope],” Holz explained.
Golden Synura algae colonies drift across the frame as larger rotifers streak past in fast, pale arcs, backed by strands of filamentous algae.
Jess Holz
In January 2026, Holz held an exhibition of her work at Harvard Ed Portal’s Crossings Gallery titled, “Plankton Paintings: Footprints of the Invisible.” As members of the public and the scientific community examined the plankton on display, Holz underscored the urgency of paying closer attention to these organisms. Other than plankton, she added, “People were surprised how many microplastics I find…They’re in all my samples and they glow like a neon sign.”
She hopes the work will increase awareness of plankton and their environmental significance, encouraging audiences to see them not as something creepy, but as objects of curiosity and wonder.
Got an eye-catching, science image that tells a story? Submit it for a feature in our Science Snapshot column!
#Artist #Showcases #Plankton #Microscope #Lens
