I am a Biology Professor at Capital Community College in Hartford, CT (USA). I started making videos in TikTok because I wanted to show my students, and people in general, that Biology is fascinating and fun. I also want to show the beauty of the little details that we tend to miss because our naked eye can’t perceive them.

As an educator, social media is a great portal to communicate to other people and to spread important messages. So I decided to use social media to show that biology is not just a subject to study in school but rather it is something that we all want to learn more about because it affects us all in our daily lives.

In the video “Microscopic life in a water stream in the middle of the forest”, I examined the microscopic creatures that live in a stream of water deep in the forest. The purpose of this video was to show that life is everywhere and that nothing in nature is sterile and that is the way it should be. Even though we don’t see these creatures with our naked eye, the organisms in this video are fundamental components of the forest ecosystem.

One of the highlights of this video is the first scene. In the first scene I show a unicellular organism –a protozoan– attacking a microscopic multicellular animal –a gastrotrich- that passes nearby. In this video I also show several types of unicellular photosynthetic organisms –diatoms- that have perfectly symmetrical beautiful shapes.