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The words "ocean life" inspire images of fish, invertebrates, plants, and mammals
as well as the environment that they live in.
However, much of the ocean's biodiversity is in the details that can't be seen with the naked eye.
both on larger animals, and in the tiny organisms that form the foundation of the marine food web.
Carla Stehr, at NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center,
spends her days peering into this world,
using a scanning electron microscope to view the "sea unseen."
"I work with a large group of people that looks at effects of contaminants on fish,
and we do a lot of different things to do that.
And my speciality is using light and electron microscopes to look at
effects of contaminants esepcially on the level of the cell.
This microscope starts out at a magnification of about 30 times
and it goes up to about 300,000 times in magnification.
It's different than a light microscope because it uses electrons instead of light
and electrons have a much shorter wavelength than light does,
so that means you can see particles very close together
more than you can with a light microscope.
This one is a scanning electron microscope, so it scans over the surface of the tissue
or whatever we want to look at, so that we can see all the surface features.
You can't see through it, but you can see the really cool patterns at a very high magnification
much more so than with a light microscope.
What I like about working with a scanning electron microscope is that
you can see things that a lot of other people can't see
There's these teeny, tiny details on these organisms that I never knew existed,
that probably most people don't know.
And I look at that and go, this is amazing...
...why would something this small have these amazing patterns?
Those are the kinds of thing that fascinate me,
and the scanning electron microscope gives me an opportunity to see a lot of those little things
that you would not be able to see any other way."