Four young blacktip reef sharks glide through a school hardyhead silversides in the shallow waters of the Maldives. The fish scatter, trying to avoid the hungry predators. The moment (seen below) is captured from a drone above by Dr. Angela Albi. Albi’s compelling image documenting the dynamics of predator and prey relationships took home the 2024 Royal Society Publishing Photography Prize.
“Just after sunrise or before sundown, the shallow waters of the Maldives become a clear, see-through surface,” Albi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, said. “These are also the moments when we best observe the interactions between reef sharks and their prey. In this frame, captured during a research trip in 2024, a shark on the far left shifts suddenly from swimming calmly within the school to initiating a hunt, its body posture standing out from the others. While we still don’t know what triggers these attacks, we analyse videos to study how sharks hunt and how their prey responds collectively.”
A key driver of animal grouping behaviour is predator avoidance. In this photo, a large school of hardyhead silversides face four juvenile blacktip reef sharks, which attack and cause the fish to respond collectively. Blacktip reef sharks are a social species and as juveniles they frequently hunt schooling fish in the shallow shores of the Maldives. Using machine learning and advanced video analysis, we track how sharks hunt and how their schooling prey responds, uncovering the complex dynamics of predator-prey interactions in their natural habitat. This image was taken using a drone, post-processed using Lightroom Classic with basic adjustments such as cropping, levels, tone, and color balance.
Credit: Angela Albi/Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024 (Drone pilot: August Paula)
Albi took home top honors from more than 500 entries. Category winners across five scientific disciplines (Astronomy, Behavior, Earth science and climatology, Ecology and environmental science, Microimaging) were also selected. The 2024 competition was presented as a collaboration between Royal Society Publishing and the Royal Photographic Society.
(Click to expand images to full size.)
Found over 7000 light years away, the Heart and Soul are two breathtaking nebulae in the Cassiopeia constellation. The nebulae are immense regions of star formation in our galaxy–my picture shows an area of the sky that is nine full Moons across. To capture their intricate details, I photographed the faint nebulae for nearly 14 hours over three nights in fall 2023, from the city skies of the Chicago suburbs. Ionized gas in the Heart and Soul glows in vivid colors, shown here in the HOO color palette, where hydrogen is mapped in red and oxygen appears as blues and greens. I was able to overcome the extreme light pollution of city skies, a growing challenge that is detrimental to both stargazing and astrophotography, by using a special filter which only allows certain wavelengths of light to pass through.
Credit: Imran Sultan/Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024
For my undergraduate course in Ecology, I took students out in intertidal zone on the Indian western coast. While teaching sampling, we found something my students hadn’t seen before. I had accidentally unearthed a live flatfish! “This is not possible, it has to be a mutation!” exclaimed a student seeing its asymmetric eyes. It’s flat because it is a benthic species, but why the eyes are so weird? Here comes the Evo-Devo! Interestingly, they are born symmetric, but during this sinistral metamorphosis its right eye moves to the left. In my opinion, this observation is also important as it evidently disproves a pseudoscientific notion of evolution called ‘intelligent design’. If it were a perfect and intelligent design, why would one eye be situated so odd in this species? I loved our Piscean Mad-Eye Moody for being odd yet loyal to science of evolution.
Credit: Abhijeet Bayani/Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024 ABHIJEET BAYANI
The image of a galactic core of the Milky Way was taken from the Kottamia Astronomical Observatory in Egypt. I went away from city lights to take advantage of the dark sky to record this beauty of the summer sky. It took me three nights to take hundreds of photos and stacked them together choosing the best photos with a total exposure of more than five hours. All photos were tracked using a star tracker to be able to take long exposure photos. The raw photo had to go through some edits using Adobe Photoshop to show the details and colors of the Milky Way.
Credit: Mohamed Aboushelib/Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024
Each spring, shortly after the frost melts, in mountain areas starts the migration of the European toads (Bufo bufo) to the breeding sites with sufficient water for egg-laying and tadpole development, such as ponds, lakes, or temporary rain-filled pools. At a 1050m artificial dam lake in Romania’s Retezat National Park, an intense breeding frenzy was observed, with numerous toads gathering to mate. The male-dominated sex ratio creates fierce competition, with many males piling onto single females, forming chaotic clusters of toads and egg strings all over the place. An interesting fact has been observed in the area, where another toad, namely European green toad (Bufotes viridis) possibly driven by climate change and by the favorable man-made habitats at the dam, made them to reach this altitude and participate in the breeding activity, showing an interbreeding behavior, often piling onto other species. Although hybridization can occur, the offspring are not viable.
This interaction is depicted in the image, showing a less visible European green toad as the second toad on top of the pile.
Credit: Ovidiu Dragan/Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024 Ovidiu Dragan
The photo depicts a supraglacial melting lake over the Greenlandic ice sheet, ranging from some meters to several kilometres wide. Increasing in numbers due to climate change, they can suddenly drain if a crack in the ice appears, hydrofracturing, collecting water at the bottom of the lubricating the glacier and speeding its flow towards the ocean. Greenland’s ice sheet is the second largest ice mass in our planet, and its melting would raise the sea level approximately 7 meters.
Taken during a flight from Kangerlussuaq to Ilulissat, when a small window of light appeared, it was singular due to hundreds of small aquamarine structures formed by melting and thawing process. Although some clouds cast shadows over the lake, I was elated to have captured the image.
Credit: David Garcia/Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024
This image depicts the eyes of a bark scorpion (Centruroides exilicauda) from Baja California, Mexico, observed under fluorescence using a 10x/0.3 objective lens. The appearance of the scorpion’s eyes in the photo is not typical; after several hours of working with the specimen, the scorpion dried out, allowing me to capture the 110 images necessary for the focus stacking process.
Credit: Jose Manuel Martinez Lopez/Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024
In this photograph, the mycelium of Armillaria sprawls across the surface, forming a pattern reminiscent of a Lovecraftian world map. The intricate, web-like structures of the mycelium are artfully illuminated by five strategically placed LED lights, casting an eerie glow and dramatic shadows that accentuate its otherworldly appearance. This striking sample was meticulously grown at the R&D department of Technische Universität München and then sent to UWE, School of Computing and Creative Technologies for photography.
To capture the full depth and complexity of this fascinating subject, focus stacking was employed. This technique involves taking multiple shots at different focus distances and then combining them to create a single image with an extended depth of field. The resulting image highlights not only the biological beauty and complexity of fungal growth but also the scientific phenomena of mycelial networks, showcasing their ability to spread and intertwine in intricate, expansive patterns.
Credit: Jose Manuel Martinez Lopez/Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024
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