Micro Life: Miracles of the Miniature World Revealed

Book Preface

Elephants are big, dinosaurs were bigger, blue whales are the biggest ever…but is size really important, do big things make the world go round, and is being big really so impressive? And do you have to be big to be beautiful?

Put simply, no. As we take a fantastic voyage into the micro-life of our planet, the profound and unimaginable beauty previously hidden from our “big” eyes is revealed—the rainbow wefts of wafting cilia, the exquisite symmetry of diatoms’ skeletons, the “op art” of a fly’s compound eyes.
But beauty is more than skin deep in the microscopic world. Here lie the origins of life itself, of our life, and all its complex history and ongoing interrelationships still form the essential fabric of our whole planet’s ecology. Here, the multitudes of the minute are pictured using remarkable microscopic technologies and each of their little stories told. And it’s both surprising and amazing that we live our lives among this invisible horde of littler things and never appreciate or understand their fundamental importance. So shrink your world and dive into another, denied to us by scale alone. Meet your neighbors—they are all around you, on you, and inside you—viruses, bacteria, other microbes—some bad, many good. See inside your organs, peer inside cells, discover the methods of insect senses, and how pollen, seeds, and spores work. Come face to face with a tardigrade, a mite, and the curious, beady eyes of a springtail.

This spectacular book is a portal into a world within our world—one we are too big to know but clever enough to have unveiled.