The hidden beauty of marine life revealed in the ITSASAMPLE exhibition

This morning saw the inauguration of the ITSASAMPLE exhibition; it will allow visitors to immerse themselves in a hidden world, a marine universe invisible to the human eye that comes to life through stunning images of biological organisms captured with nanoGUNE's electron microscopes. The ITSASAMPLE exhibition gathers together beautiful, astonishing images of various marine species and organisms of the Aquarium of Donostia / San Sebastian, with the aim of showing the public what is hidden from their eyes. The exhibition, which opened today, can be visited until November 9 in the Nautilus room of the Aquarium of Donostia / San Sebastian.

Itsasample - presentation

In this exhibition, electron microscopy, a cutting-edge tool in scientific research in the understanding of matter, plays a crucial role, since these microscopes are the eyes and hands of the research teams, enabling them to reveal, in this case, the features hidden from the naked eye of the samples provided by the Aquarium of Donostia / San Sebastian.  The Plentzia Marine Station (PiE-UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country) has also participated in the analysis of the images by helping to interpret the information provided by the microscope images. So in ITSASAMPLE we get to see, for example, the grooves of scales, which can be used to estimate the age of the fish in a way similar to the rings of a tree trunk; or the tiny filaments that accumulate in the area of lobsters’ claws, and which act as mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors to help them search for and collect food.  

The images have been obtained by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), a very powerful scanning technique used to observe very small things that are invisible either to the naked eye, or through the best optical microscopes. “Instead of light, SEM uses an electron beam to scan the surface of the sample, the objects we want to analyze. When the electrons interact with the sample they emit certain signals that are detected in order to generate images of very high precision. These images reveal the surface topography –the relief– and chemical composition of the samples, allowing us to observe textures, patterns and thin structures in stunning detail,” said Oksana Yurkevich, a researcher in nanoGUNE's Electron Microscopy group and author of most of the images in the exhibition. “The resulting microscope images are in black and white; the colors of the SEM images in this exhibition have been added during post-processing to enhance them visually, but they do not represent the physicochemical properties of the sample,” as Oksana Iurkevich pointed out. “SEM microscopy, which can achieve a resolution of up to 100 times higher than that of the best optical microscopes, makes it possible to observe tiny structures, as small as one nanometer, some 100,000 times thinner than a human hair or a sheet of paper,” added the nanoGUNE specialist. 

ITSASAMPLE promises to be an unforgettable experience for those seeking to admire the beauty of the marine world from a fresh perspective. According to the team that curated the exhibition, “these images not only provide scientifically valuable information for the study of these species, but are, in our opinion, of an almost celestial beauty”. 

The exhibition can be visited until 9 November in the Nautilus room of the Aquarium of Donostia / San Sebastian and will be open to the public on Friday and Saturday afternoons from 16:00 hrs until 19:00 hrs.  The exhibition can also be visited on the Aquarium's regular admission ticket.

Special visits

Two visits guided by Oksana Yurkevich will be organized on 16 and 30 October at 18:00hrs. These visits will be geared towards everyone. 

A special activity intended for families has also been organized for Saturday, 19 October; it includes a short guided visit to the ITSASAMPLE exhibition and a craft session in which clay will be used to interpret some microscopic life forms. 

Pre-registration is needed for both activities. Full information is available via the nanoGUNE website: www.nanogune.eu