Marine conservation photojournalist Shane Gross captured this simply unreal image of a swarm of western toad tadpoles in a Canadian lake, and with it won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.
Organized by the London Natural History Museum, the contest is in its 60th year. The judges were not only blown away by the mixtures of color and light but by the fact that no one had ever submitted an image of tadpoles before.
Gross was snorkeling in Cedar Lake, on Vancouver Island, trying as best as he could to avoid disrupting the silt and algae anchoring the roots of plants like lilypads under which he was swimming.
“The jury was captivated by the mix of light, energy, and connectivity between the environment and the tadpoles,” explains Kathy Moran, chair of the judging panel. “We were equally excited by the addition of a new species to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year archive.”
These tadpoles are from a near-threatened species of toad, and in a typical year, 99% will not survive to adulthood.
Gross described himself as “over the moon” to have won the award.
“I hope the attention this image brings our amphibians and wetlands leads to much-needed and urgent protections,” the photographer wrote on his Instagram, which is a worthwhile follow if you love nature. “If you know of an important place in your backyard, let’s rally the community together and fight for its protection.”
The runner-up to first place was by Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas from Germany, who used a technique called ‘focus stacking’ to quickly take many images, each with a different focus point, before superimposing them to create the right blend of clarity.
He had to work fast though, as his target was a springtail insect, which at the time seemed to be carefully observing the fruiting body of a slime mold. Both were fixed to the underside of a dead log in the forest, and when Tinker-Tsavalas turned it over, he had seconds to act as springtails can easily jump away like a flea.
This year’s contestants, of which there was a record number, included the first winner with a smartphone—for the category of natural artistry. Checking trail cameras near his home in Susanville, California, Randy Robbins found a deer that had passed away over the night.
He whipped out his smartphone and took a poignant picture of its peaceful rest, one with the ice and rime on the forest floor.
Winning the special commendation for capturing animal behavior, Xingchao Zhu used his Chinese New Year holiday off to stalk a group of Pallas Cats in the mountains of Inner Mongolia.
His winner captured a large, exceptionally fluffy individual that succeeded in its hunt for birds. The full moon—the sign of the new year, illuminated this nocturnal hunter stunningly.
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