image by Jim Swafford

Summer 2001 MYSTERY IMAGE

It has been a long hot summer. We had some very good answers to this mystery image. Many of them were very creative. 

What was the mystery image?

Even though you may not know it by looking at them, the leaves of many plants have some pretty tough looking surfaces. At least they are very wicked looking under a scanning electron microscope. So what is it? It is the surface of a leaf from a zucchini plant. To our eye, the leaf looks fuzzy and sometimes feels velvety soft.

Why do some plant leaves have these kind of hairs? The hairy spines help reduce water loss and prevent too much heat (light) to penetrate the leaf.

This mystery image actually stumped almost everyone that sent in guesses. There were a few people that thought it was part of a plant (mainly the flower petals).  However, the creative answers were just as good as the real answer. Here are the results of the submissions.

If you are curious, here are some numbers from our list of guesses. 

• 75% guessed it was the hairs on a persons arm
• 12% guessed that it was the surface of an insect
• 8% guessed that was some plant surface (real close).
• 5% guessed it was the surface of some type of animal other than humans.

Some great creative single answers are listed below. 

• Under water aisle reef
• Sharks skin (ouch)
• A surface of an insect, such as the thorax of a fly, bee, or the back of the abdomen.
• The bottom eyelash
• It's a worm's bristle thingies that help it crawl back into its hole when trouble comes.
• peach fuzz
• pollen
• fly's back
• parasite that causes bubonic plague
• Cat's tongue (purr...fect answer)