Iobopen.com is hosting a series of blogs based on an article from Outside about “Awe” being good for the brain. We asked IOB authors to share their moments of “Awe” in the field or in their work.

Read our next installation below by IOB coauthor Jaro Homburger. Jaro co-authored:

Within and Between-Leg Oil Transfer in an Oil Bee Open Access

J Homburger , M Pineirua , J Casas , T Speck , F Gallenmüller

 https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaf025

“Being in nature has always brought a sense of joy—watching animals, observing the geometries of plant structures, admiring the beauty of this intricate manifold of diverse entities and its interplay with different environments. There’s also a particular fascination with the microscopic world, where even the smallest elements of nature reveal astonishing complexity. No wonder I fell in love with those tiny creatures collecting oil for their nest construction to prevent moisture and fungi of spoiling the egg. Even if the bees are almost to fast for the human eye, I enjoy observing their nature collecting oil, flying from flower to flower and communicating with each other via their upheld hind legs.

But not just living nature is or was appealing to me. In particular, water has always held a special fascination for me—whether feeling in it while swimming, diving, showering, canoeing, playing with it and its surface tension e.g. making soap bubbles or observe the surface deformation when skipping stones, letting watercolors drip into a bigger basin of water and seeing the Raleigh-Taylor instability at its work. I am even fascinated by just observing it while standing beneath waterfalls, watching the rain and observing raindrops falling into a vast stretch of water, observing the waves forming or looking at the condensated dewdrops clinging delicately to the tips of leaves, blades of grass, and strands of spider silk forming whole tiny universes.

Both aspects— the intriguing thought that bees can manipulate the flower oil almost passively and the affinity for water and, with it, the fascination with liquids—culminated in a moment of awe. This occurred when the setae on the oil bee’s foreleg first made contact with the microdroplet triggering a sudden and explosive expansion of the droplet’s surface which defied my expectations. The moment was deeply symbolical, representing the countless microscopic wonders that mainly remain invisible to us unless we make a intellectually and technically demanding effort to reveal them through optical setups. It also made me realize that life unfolds on multiple scales, since these bees are so small and move with such incredible speed collecting and moving the oil while hovering to the next flower.

I love exploration and it doesn’t matter where or what, when I’m surfing on surfaces with an AFM, X-Ray vision into object with an µCT, flying over gold coated structures with an SEM, filming and photographing in the microscopic realm or exploring the world by foot, bike, car, glide, train or plain. Staying curious means a lot to me and while trying to uphold my curiosity I hope my research and findings can be an inspiration for others as well as all the great people whose findings sparked my curiosity before.”

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