1/21/2007

Portland Press Herald (Maine)

By Meredith Goad

Sometimes, the most beautiful things come in the plainest packages.

From the drabbest chrysalis, a stunning butterfly may emerge.
The dullest blossom can exude a fragrance so exquisite it makes your head swim.

It's a way of looking at the world that Sara Lindsay knows very well.

Lindsay, an assistant professor of marine sciences at the University of Maine, studies some of the ugliest creatures on the planet - mudworms.

The family of worms she has devoted her career to are tiny, wiggly things, as long as the stem on an apple but half as wide. They live mostly in the mud or in sand flats. Magnified hundreds of times, they look like something out of a science fiction movie. That is, perhaps, appropriate since, if they lose their head, they can grow another one.

These marine worms take the definition of homely to new heights. But when Lindsay takes photos of her research subjects under the light of a microscope, something wonderful happens. Nerves shoot into a rainbow of colors. Bristles glow an azure blue. Eggs and red blood cells, magnified 400 times, look like an abstract painting hanging on a gallery wall somewhere.

Science is transformed into art.

Another marine worm researcher at the university, a doctoral candidate, received some national attention this year for her work studying how marine worms burrow into mud. Lindsay has broken some scientific ground of her own, but it is the artistic photos of her mudworms that have garnered her national recognition.

She won the 2006 Buchsbaum Prize for Excellence in Photomicrography, awarded by the American Microscopical Society, for an image she took of a larval worm that was so transparent its jaws glowed under the light of the microscope.

"You want to know what this little worm can do?" Lindsay said. "That little worm has a throat - essentially it's called a pharynx, just like we have - that it can turn inside out. At the end of it are those little jaws. You are looking at the pharynx through the top of the worm, and it's inside. But if it were trying to capture something, it would just throw that whole thing out and it would end in these two pincing jaws."

There are two other longstanding, prestigious national awards for people who take photos of very, very small things. One is sponsored by Nikon and is known as the "Small World" competition. The first- place winner in that competition last year was a close-up of a mouse colon.

The other is the Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition. Lindsay garnered an honorable mention in the 2005 competition for her photo of bristles, known as hooded hooks, that the worms use to anchor themselves.

"I don't think I'll ever win the Nikon one because it can be any microscopic image of anything," she said, "and people put crystals in, and crystals are hard to compete with."

YOU SAY SPEE-OH-NID

The worms Lindsay studies are called spionids. It's pronounced spee-oh-nid. Or some people say spy-oh-nid. Lindsay learned it as spee-ah-nid, but now says spee-oh-nid.

"It's a case of 'you say tom-ay-toe, I say tom-ah-toe,' " she said.

The worms live in tubes that look like little white curly-cues that are attached to algae, kelp, boats, pilings and other surfaces. Most live in mud flats or sand flats, either in intertidal areas or the deep sea. Others bore into oyster shells, or live in cooperation with hermit crabs.

These critters are everywhere, and they serve an important purpose. Think about your garden.

"When you've got a nice healthy garden," Lindsay said, "you hope that you've got a lot of earthworms in there, keeping the soil aerated, turned over, and turning through the dirt and other stuff, enriching it. The spionids, like other worms that live with them, do exactly that for mud flats."

They are also food for shrimp and fish.

To study the worms, Lindsay has to be able to identify them, but she can't do that with the naked eye. She uses a variety of instruments to view them, including a simple compound microscope outfitted with a digital camera and a special set of filters.

An electron microscope produces three-dimensional images in black- and-white.

She also uses a laser scanning microscope that works something like an MRI. It takes pictures of small sections of a worm, one by one. The images are then merged by a computer into a single three- dimensional image.

The colors that show up in Lindsay's photos depend upon the piece of equipment she's using. Bristles on a worm glow blue when they are seen through ultraviolet light. The different colors of the nerves represent how deep into the sample a nerve is located - blue or green means it's closer, red means it's farther away.

APPRECIATING WHAT'S REAL

Some people play with the colors, changing them a great deal, but "I don't like to do that," Lindsay said. You won't find her manipulating images for artistic reasons, either. What you see is what you get in nature.

"I try really hard not to alter things," she said.

Most of the photos she takes have some scientific value, but, she admits, "some of them are just cool."

It was Lindsay's father, a retired cell biologist and amateur nature photographer named David Lindsay, who first got her to view her images, and think about them, in a different way. It all started with a photo of some stalked, cuplike structures on the feeding palps of a worm.

"I showed it to him and he said, 'Well, yeah, that's really neat. But you know, you could make it clearer if you did this. What if you cropped it and rotated it this way?' " Lindsay recalled. "He critiques my work now."

There's one image Lindsay still wants, but hasn't quite been able to capture.

The bamboo worm lives in mud flats and gets its name from the long segments that make up its body. The worm carries a slight, somewhat elusive iridescence.

"It's all about lighting," Lindsay said. "If I use the light microscope and I have transmitted light so the light is coming up through the specimen, it's too thick. The worm is too thick because it's big, so it blocks the light and you don't see (the iridescence).

Lindsay has pondered the idea of turning her creations into a coffee table book one day. But for now, the photography is an interesting sideline that takes a back seat to teaching and research.

The photos may just be a hobby, but they teach an important lesson, too. It's one of life's best lessons:

"Everything is really beautiful when you take the time to look at it," Lindsay said.