Planktonium

Scoop up a cup of water anywhere on Earth, and you will find strange, entrancing life-forms called plankton. From brilliantly colored blobs to miniature monsters adorned with tentacles and gigantic eyes, every drop of H2O, be it freshwater or seawater, hums with microscopic life most of us have never seen.

For the past three years, Dutch filmmaker and photographer Jan Van IJken has made it his goal to illuminate the beauty of this unseen world. Van IJken has traveled throughout the Netherlands, swishing his plankton-collecting net through various bodies of water and then using time-lapse photography or video to capture the tiny treasures on microscope slides.

“Plankton is so incredibly diverse and incredibly abundant,” says Van IJken, who released a new artistic film called Planktonium on November 17. “Every time I throw my net, I can work for weeks on what I find.”

All plankton can be separated into two basic categories—phytoplankton, which are plants, and zooplankton, tiny animals such as rotifers, which look like they have mini wheels for mouths. (Watch the full-length version of Planktonium .)

Technically, any animal that is free-floating—and therefore can’t control its own trajectory—is considered plankton, which translates to “drifter” or “wanderer” in ancient Greek. That means plankton can be as small as a single-celled organism the size of a white blood cell or as big as a lion’s mane jellyfish, which can reach 120 feet in length.