The wonderful world of Wim

Sunday, 6th September. 11.00 AM.

You must meet Wim. He’s a Dutch museum curator who has single-handedly conceived of and created one of the most fascinating biological collections in the world. There is just one criteria for inclusion into Wim’s hallowed institution – you have to be less than 1mm big.

I started getting to know Wim properly soon after emerging from the trauma of sea-sickness (now wonderfully set to music by our on-board musical / acrobatic quartet The Ashton Brothers with their new, original hit: “The Long-Room Blues… with vomit all over my shoes….”).

Wim is an obsessive, determined, sensitive and hugely skillful perfectionist. He is also my room-mate. Wim is excellent company, with a GSOH and, I can vouch, he comes completely snore-free.

His self-styled title of curator – not artist or scientist - is significant. Wim is not interested in personal interpretations or rational measurements. He simply wants to reveal the extraordinary hidden world hidden from us by the parameters of the naked eye.

Following in the steps of fellow countryman Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723), Wim spends most his daylight hours peering down a microscope. Unlike Leeuwenhoek Wim is able to take advantage of the most up to date techniques in digital and 3D photography to bring this magical microscopic world into view.

His studio, just below deck, is cram packed with myriad microscopes, lenses, cameras and video recorders. There he works diligently, most hours of the day, collecting samples from the oceans, taking pictures and adding to his collections for the benefit of anyone curious enough to want to see what it’s really like in the ‘less than 1mm big’ league of life.

“Just because something’s less than 1mm big doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful….” says Wim.
His pictures more than prove the point. Small really is beautiful. Each image is exquisitely detailed and some are even available in 3D through a stereoscopic viewer. After seeing them I came away feeling far more familiar with the anatomy of an almost invisible acorn weevil with its lunging proboscis, complete with tiny jaws, than I have ever felt about something large, like a dolphin or a whale.

His aptly named Micropolitan Museum is open to anyone to visit on the web (see www.micropolitanmuseum.com). So, over the last few days, I have had the enormous pleasure not only of getting to know Wim, but also of getting visually familiar with a whole dimension of life I have never properly met before.

The museum is divided into a series of rooms. Fancy a bit of fun? Then pop into the waterflea circus. Looking for a life at its most primitive? You’ll find in the bacteria basement. Fancy a breath of fresh air? Try out the botanical garden…. Oh, and Wim’s also constructed a handy floor-plan if ever you get lost.

Every image is a feast for the eye. Some are composites, made from as many as 50 separate photos, digitally stitched together to make a most detailed canvass of microscopic life. As you zoom in, far closer than the naked eye can see, the details get even more intricate, not less.

“Everytime I see these pictures”, says Wim, “I find something in them I never spotted before”.

They are, quite literally, entire microscopic ecosystems painstakingly captured and made visible to an almost infinite resolution. They make you lose yourself in wonder.

During the trip, Wim has been catching plankton from the sea using a special silk net. Yesterday, as the rest of us feasted our attention on the dolphins, Wim was busily analyzing his latest catch of creatures below the 1 mm threshold.

Coming into focus under his microscope were the most incredibly beautiful and fascinating forms of life which, I found out later, were easily as impressive as the flirtatious dolphins above deck.
My favourite was Larvacea. This creature has special significance for me because it belongs to the Sea Squirt family, ranked 12th place in What on Earth Evolved? 100 Species that Changed the World.

These tiny marine creatures are unique in building their own mucus houses, some of which can grow as large as 1 metre square. They use their powerful notochord tails to beat water through these membrane-like structures, netting tiny particles of food.

Once their mucus construction gets clogged up, they then abandon it, and swim off to build a new one – a process that occurs about once every four hours. The old mucus house then descends like a parachute, providing much needed nutrients to creatures that live on the sea floor.

Such house-building habits are thought to have a quantifiable impact on the global climate. Researchers at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), California, have been measuring the effect of Larvacea on the oceans. They believe substantial quantities of carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere as a result of this parachuting process, which pumps dead organic matter to the sea floor.

Such research is currently being used by oceanographers and climatologists to help puzzle out what impact a rise in global sea temperatures may have on this natural biological process.
The specimen under Wim’s microscope looked like a giant question mark, with its head tucked up into a coil and its tail curing around beneath.

Last night, after dinner, he grabbed me excitedly “I have found another one, and this time you can see the mucus house…..!”

There it was, crystal clear, with its latest mucus construct bobbing up and down, surrounded by what seemed like an enormous ocean filled with other magnified travelers that variously passed by. There they were, dancing within an almost invisible blob of ocean fluid on a microscopic slide, an enlightened perspective on life for anyone curious enough to want to peer inside the Wonderful World of Wim.