An award-winning video shows a baby Tardigrade riding a predatory worm

A baby tardigrade had the confidence to hitch a ride on the back of one of its biggest predators — a microscopic worm called a nematode — in a video that won fifth place and $600. in Tuesday’s Nikon Small World in Motion video competition.

“Nematodes often eat tardigrades, so the stakes were pretty high,” Quinten Geldhof, the 24-year-old amateur who shot the video of this “wild ride” through a microscope, said in an email for Business Insider. “I had never seen anything like it.”

See for yourself in the video below:

This Wild West scene is a little bizarre, but not entirely surprising to experts.

“It’s one of those occasions that may arise, but you rarely have a camera handy to record the event,” Sandra McInnes, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey who studies tardigrades, said in an email.

McInnes said the animal in this video appears to be a species of Diphascon tardigrade, which averages about 0.35 millimeters in length.

There is a practical reason why they might have jumped on the nematode bandwagon.

“Tardigrades cannot walk on glass/plastic Petri dishes,” said Paul Bartels, a tardigrade researcher and professor of biology at Warren Wilson College, in an email. “I think this tardigrade just encountered the nematode and it was something it could understand, which is better than struggling helplessly.”

A microscope and a smartphone

Geldhof says he collected some moss from the sidewalk near his home in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and used a device called a Baermann funnel to filter out the microorganisms. He ended up with a nematode and a batch of tardigrade eggs, visible through a microscope.

He stored them on a glass slide in a homemade humidity chamber—basically, a closed box with wet paper towels to prevent the slide from drying out.

Within a few days the tardigrades had hatched and there were about five babies waddling down the slide.

“One of these little moss piggies wandered over to a nematode on the chute and promptly climbed aboard, much to my surprise,” Geldhof said.

He was filming at the right time, using a Swift 380B microscope he bought on Amazon and an adapter that held his iPhone 14 Pro camera up to the microscope’s eyepiece. The entire setup costs less than $1,000, he said.

Geldhof got into microscope videography about two years ago after he started following several microscope video creators on YouTube. He shares his own videos on Instagram, where his handle is @microhobbyist.

“I found it absolutely fascinating to see things from a microscopic point of view, just putting all kinds of things around the house or pond water, ocean water under the microscope, and I wanted a way to share that with people,” he he said. .

“There’s always something surprising to find everywhere you look,” he added.