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Inner-space colonies

They look like space stations, but actually are colonial forms of single-celled organisms called radiolarians, collected in the deep Celebes Sea. The white blobs are individual cells, and the geodesic dome-like structure is the architectural structure of the colony. Radiolarians make such structures out of glass-like slivers of silica. These were collected by Laurence Madin of the Biology Department on a 2006 cruise to explore the deep Celebes Sea, in the Philippines .(Photo by Larry Madin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)