image by William Sharp

1999 SUMMER MYSTERY IMAGE

We hope everyone had a great summer. The guesses we received this summer were quite interesting. No one identified the image, but several folks got very close. From the categories of animal, mineral, vegetable (plant), if you guessed that it was some part of plant then you were correct. This is a microscopic view of the surface of a tomato plant leaf. The microscope used was a scanning electron microscope.

For those of you that are curious, here are some numbers from our list of guesses.

• 46% guessed that it was part of a plant.
• 23% guessed that it was mold or fungus.
• 2% guessed that it was part of an animal or an animal.

Some of the creative single answers are listed below.

• The black stuff on a rotten tomato.
• Lichen growing on a rock.
• Dog or Flee hair.
• Spore sac of of a spore farming fungus.
• Gelatinous receptacles of enzymatic fluid that will digest an invertebrate caught on this surface of a carnivorous plant like a sundew.
• This image looks like a coconut tree with no leaves, or the back of a porcupine at 1000x larger than the eye could see.