“There is more life in one cubic foot than anyone could look at in a month,” says photographer David Liittschwager. And he should know—he’s become famous for carting a green cube around the globe, one cubic foot in area, placing it anywhere from a coral reef in French Polynesia to New York City’s Central Park, then documenting all of the life he finds inside. He photographed cubes in five different locations for National Geographic magazine in 2010, with stunning results.

Liittschwager jokes that his “dirty little secret” is that he’s never actually finished photographing all the life in the cubes. “I’m happy that the world is so rich that I failed at my job. We did the best