Inner Space with labels

A numbered key to the organisms featured in this illustration.

1.) Phylodina roseala, a common rotifer

2.) Phacus warszewiczii, a species of euglenid.

3.) Stylonchia mytilus, a stichotrich ciliate that walks on leg-like cirri on its underside.

4.) A tardigrade, everyone's favorite trundily water-bear.

5.) The shed, empty shell of a female tardigrade filled with fertilized eggs

6.) Echinosphaerium eichorni, a heliozoan

7.) Vorticella, a ciliate that extends itself above the substrate on a long, spring-like tether. If disturbed, it can quickly retract down out of danger by coiling up its tether.

8.) Epalxella mirabilis, an armored heterotrichean ( a group of ciliates). I particularly like this organism since it looks like some kind of floating alien intelligence, hovering quietly over an extrasolar desert, thinking its strange, unfathomable alien thouhts. Kind of like that floater from the cover of Barlowe's Expedition.

9.) Volvox, a large colony of photosynthetic cells, The larger green cells in the interior are zygotes that will eventually break out to form new colonies.

10.) The classic Amoeba. In real life, these amorphous organisms actually walk slightly elevated above the substrate on pseudopods.

11.) Chrysopyxis cyathus, a filter-feeding prokaryote that lives inside a test shaped like an Erlenmeyer flask.

The large, green cords surrounding this scene are filaments of green algae, while the tiny branching structures growing on them are colonies of bacteria.