Just because you can't see some of these tiny horrors with the naked eye doesn't mean they aren't scary as hell.
Out of more than 2,000 entries from over 70 countries, the top winners in the Tenth Annual Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition include a carnivorous plant called a humped bladderwort, the ghostly embryo of a black mastiff bat and a caddisfly larva (above) that looks like it's about to eat your face.
According to Yahoo News, Igor Siwanowicz took First Prize for this laser-scope photo of the bladderwort, which sounds scary enough thanks to its habit of sucking in passing creatures like the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi, but it's even more alien-looking after being treated with a glowing dye.
Second Prize went to Dorit Hockman, who used a stereo microscope to capture this bat embryo in its colorless “peek-a-boo” stage, which makes it look like a bashful ghost.
Check out all the winning BioScape photos in this gallery at LiveScience.