In the comment stream following an article here about cyberbullying,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=bullies-turn-cyberspace-sour-13-05-11
someone writes, “Social media could be seen as a sort of petri dish for studying the methods and morays of such individuals.”
About which, two images.
From my former life, a petri dish full of bacterial colonies, with a human hand to show scale: 
From my present life on a reef-girded island, a moray (photograph not by me):
And on behalf of language and its property of evoking visual imagery, a song of joy:
O tempora! My hovercraft (as M. Python once exclaimed) is full of eels!