A ball of male bees eager to mate with an unmarried female, the reproductive dance of a giant starfish, a rare whale mating photo and other ordinary moments in the lives of wild animals are among the winning photographs of the wildlife photographer from the Natural History Museum in London. . Contest of the Year.
The general name won through American photographer Karine Aigner for “The Big Buzz,” a close-up of a “buzzing ball of cactu bees spinning in the hot sand of a Texas ranch. “
Aigner is the fifth woman to earn the name in the nearly six-decade history of the annual foreign festival that was founded in 1965 to showcase the best wildlife photography.
“Karine was taking a regime walk on a ranch in Texas. . . when something caught his attention. She tells how “the ground suddenly turned into hail through a bunch of volcano-shaped turrets” and that her initial idea was “what kind of ants are ‘bees’, the organizers.
The winners of this year’s 58th festival were selected from more than 38,500 participants from 93 countries.
All winning and finalist photographs are now on display in a newly redesigned exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London that opened on 14 October and runs until 2 July 2023.
The exhibition will then tour the UK, continental Europe, North America (including Texas and Michigan), Australia and New Zealand.
The upcoming festival is now open to programs by photographers of all ages, delights in titles and nationalities and closes on December 8, 2022.
Karine Aigner approaches the action when an organization of cactus bees compete to mate in a flurry of activity that creates a buzzing ball spinning on the hot sand. After a few minutes, the pair in the middle: a male clings to the female in the melee: he flew to mate.
The world’s bees are threatened by pesticides, climate change, habitat loss and disruptive agricultural practices.
The species belongs to the genus Diadasia, which are solitary bees. This means that unlike bees, for example, they do not build hives and live collectively. Instead, they nest separately on the ground, and the female has the sole duty to build it. own nest.
The word solitaire, however, can be misleading. These bees build their nests close to each other and feed within a radius of 50 to 2000 meters around their nesting site.
The concentration of so many nests in a domain means that when it comes time for mating, the position comes alive with thousands of bees buzzing inches off the ground.
With 70% of bee species nesting underground, it is vital that herbal soil spaces are not disturbed.
Junji Takasago overcomes altitude to produce a dream scene of Chilean flamingos smoothing out in Bolivia.
He framed his choreography in the clouds reflected high in the Andes, in the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt mine in the world. It is also one of the largest lithium mines in Bolivia, threatening the long career of those flamingos.
Lithium is used in phone and laptop batteries. Recycling electronics is one solution.
The Bat Thief, Winner, Behavior category: Amphibians and Reptiles.
Fernando Constantino Martinez waits in Kantemo, Quintana Roo, Mexico, while a Yucatan rat snake catches a bat.
Using a red light that bats and snakes are less sensitive to, he kept an eye out for this Yucatan rat snake coming out of a crevasse. He only had a few seconds to shoot when the snake retreated to its crevice with its bat prey.
Every night, at dusk, in the cave of hanging snakes, thousands of bats emerge to feed at night. It is also when hungry dark snakes emerge, which swing from the ceiling to trap their prey in the air.
The narrow spectacled bear, Winner, category Animals in their Environment.
In this poignant portrait of an endangered habitat and its inhabitant in Peñas Blancas, Quito, Ecuador, Daniel Mideros installed camera traps throughout a room used to succeed on the high-altitude plateaus to show the disappearing herbarium landscape, with the framed bear at the heart of the image.
These bears, discovered from western Venezuela to Bolivia, have suffered large declines due to fragmentation and habitat loss. Around the world, as humans continue to build and farm, the area for wildlife is very limited.
The cliff hunt, Winner, category Behavior: Mammals.
A perspective of a snow leopard (center left) carrying a herd of Himalayan mountain goats toward a steep edge of India’s Kibber Animal Sanctuary in Himachal Pradesh.
From a position on the other side of the ravine, Anand Nambiar watched as the snow leopard maneuvered upstream of the herd. It adapted perfectly to the environment, unlike Nambiar, which followed an exercise regimen to prepare for maximum altitude and bloodless temperatures.
Snow leopards live in some of the highest habitats in the world and are now classified as vulnerable. The threats come with climate change, mining and hunting of snow leopards and their prey.
Puff very best Winner, category Animal portraits.
A Canarian hubara strutting in a dizzying procession on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura.
José Juan Hernández arrived at dusk at the place of courtship of the hubara. Under the moonlight, he cupped a low skin. From this vantage point, he captured the bird’s full, bloated profile while briefly pausing from his frantic performance.
A male Canarian hubara returns every year to its courtship venue for impressive displays. Lifting the feathers from the front of his neck and throwing his head back, he will run forward before backing up, resting for a few seconds before starting again. .
New for tohorā, winner, Oceans category: overview.
Captured here is a moment of hope for a whale population that has survived all odds.
Female tohorā whales mate with many males. There is no aggression between the men in those congregations, suggesting that the festival occurs instead in the womb: the male who produces the maximum and the maximum productive sperm wins. When in mating position, the southern female right whale rolls on its back, forcing the male to reach his penis through the female’s body.
Known to Maori as tohorā, New Zealand’s population hunted to near extinction in the nineteenth century, so each new calf gives new hope.
Hindered by poor visibility, Robinson used a polecam to photograph whales gradually moving toward his boat off New Zealand’s Auckland Islands. Taking his camera to the limit in the dark water, he was relieved to locate the incredibly sharp symbol and the moment of copulation crystallized in time. .
The Bird Listening, Winner, Behavior category: Birds.
The bird is alive and in this look at the secret life of the troglodytes.
Nick Kanakis saw the young gray-breasted wooded wren feeding in Colombia’s Tatamá National Park in Risaralda. Knowing that he would disappear into the forest if he approached, he discovered a transparent domain of fallen leaves and waited. Sure enough, the little bird jumped. in the frame, it presses its ear opposite the ground to pay attention to the small insects.
This prey detection strategy is used through other birds, adding the blackbird. Grey-breasted wrens are ground-dwelling birds, heard but not seen. They emit strong, melodious songs and hoarse calls while hiding in the undergrowth.
Bear House, Winner, Urban Wildlife category.
A haunting scene of mist-shrouded polar bears taken in the long-deserted deal on the Russian island of Kolyuchin in Chukotka.
On a yacht while seeking shelter from a storm, Dmitry Kokh saw bears wandering among the buildings of the long-abandoned settlement. While exploring each and every window and door, Kokh used a low-noise drone to snap a photo that evokes a post-apocalyptic future.
In the Chukchi Sea region, lone bears tend to migrate farther north in summer, following the retreat of the sea ice they rely on to hunt seals, their main food.
If the loose sea ice remains near the coast of this rocky island, the bears investigate.
Winner of the wrestling stations, young photographer, category 10 years and under.
Two Alpine ibexes for supremacy in Pian della Mussa, Piedmont, Italy.
She was near the end of a spring day with her circle of family when Ekaterina Bee saw the fight. The two ibexers bumped into each other’s horns and continued to exchange blows on their hind legs like boxers in a ring.
At the beginning of the XIX century, after centuries of hunting, less than a hundred alpine mountain goats survived in the mountains of the French-Italian border.
Successful conservation measures mean there are more than 50,000.
Out of the fog, Winner, Young photographer, category 11-14 years.
In this monochromatic scene at the Embalse de los Hurones in Cadiz, Spain, an osprey sits in a tree, waiting for the fog to dissipate.
When Ismael Domínguez Gutiérrez arrived at the wetland, he was disappointed because he could not see beyond a few meters and, in fact, had no hope of spotting the grebes he was looking to photograph. But when the fog began to dissipate, it revealed the opportunity of this eye-catching composition.
Ospreys are the winter of the province of Andalusia. Here, the numerous reservoirs supply fish-eating birds of prey with shallow waters that are clearer than many rivers and lakes.
The good looks of Baleen, Laureate, Young photographer, category 15-17 years.
Katanyou Wuttichaitanakorn is intrigued by the contrasting colors and textures of a Bryde’s whale, which has appeared nearby.
According to the Thai government’s excursion rules for the upper Phetchaburi Gulf, the excursion boat Wuttichaitanakorn was traveling on turned off the engine when the whale gave the impression of being nearby, giving it the opportunity to capture this composition in the foreground as the ship swayed in the surf.
Bryde’s whales have up to 370 pairs of gray baleen developing their upper jaws. The plates are made of keratin, a protein that also bureaucratizes human hair and nails, and are used to remove tiny prey from the ocean.
Under the ice of Antarctica, winner, Portfolio Award category.
A “pyramid of life” is displayed in those living towers of marine invertebrates on the seafloor off Adélie Land in Antarctica, 32 meters under the ice of East Antarctica. In the center, a tree-shaped sponge is covered with life, from a giant ribbon. worms to starfish.
Laurent Ballesta endured sub-zero dives to reveal the diversity of life in Antarctica’s ice. An aquatic photographer and biologist, he led a series of primary expeditions that resulted in unprecedented images.
He has won several awards in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest, the Grand Prize for name in 2021. Their expedition to Antarctica, exploring its vast underwater biodiversity, required two years of planning, a team of expert divers and a specially evolved team.
Its 32 dives in water temperatures down to -1. 7°C (29°F) included the innermost and longest dive ever undertaken in Antarctica.
‘A Bird Theatre’, winner of the Rising Star Portfolio Award.
By hitting his camera remotely on the dust of a Polish cane field, Mateusz Piesiak took the opportunity to capture the moment when a passing peregrine falcon ran over some of the variable sandpipers to take off into the sky.
With conscientiously studied camera angles, he produced a series of intimate photographs that explore bird behavior. Winner of the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year award at the age of 14, Mateusz explored his locality during the Covid-19 lockdown. “Even a small pond or park in the middle of the city turned out to be a really smart position to photograph wildlife,” he discovered.
Shooting Star, Winner, underwater category.
This photo captures the electrifying reproductive dance of a male starfish Leiaster leachi shedding sperm into the murky water of a shallow bay in Kinko Bay, Japan, Kagoshima Prefecture.
Other nearby starfish diffused sperm and eggs into the water synchronously, but not within each other’s visual distance.
As the surrounding water filled with sperm and eggs from the breeding starfish, Tony Wu faced several challenges. Trapped in a small, enclosed bay with a macro lens for photographing small subjects, he stepped back to cram the rippling starfish into his frame of vision, in this galaxy-like scene.
Over the course of an hour or more, the starfish swayed and spun releasing jets of semen: a five-limbed dancer spinning at the silent, immortal speed of life.
The “dancing” posture of breeding starfish can release eggs and sperm, or it can drag eggs and sperm into streams where they are fertilized in combination in the water.
Magic morels, Winner, category Plants and Mushrooms.
A fairytale scene as it should be discovered in the forests of Mount Olympus frames the interaction between mushrooms for the magical scene that Agorastos Papatsanis sought to create.
He waited for the sun to clear through the trees and remove the darkness from the water in the background, then used a wide-angle lens and flashes to highlight the labyrinthine shapes of the morels.
Morels are gastronomic treasures in many parts of the world because they are difficult to grow, but in some forests they bloom naturally.
Daniel Núñez used a drone to capture the contrast between the forest and the expansion of algae and raise awareness about the effect of pollution on Lake Amatitlán, which absorbs around 75,000 tons of waste from Guatemala City each year.
“It was a sunny day with the best conditions,” he recalls of the moment in Villa Canales. “But it was an unhappy and shocking moment. ” Cyanobacteria thrive in the presence of contaminants such as sewage and agricultural fertilizers that form algal blooms. Efforts to repair the Amatitlán wetland are underway, but have been hampered by a lack of investment and allegations of political corruption.
A Cuban bullfinch is positioned along a road so that it gets used to the bustle of street life and is therefore less likely to be distracted in a competition. These birds are highly prized for their soft voice and fighting spirit.
Karine Aigner explores the dating between Cuban culture and songbirds, and the long journey of a deep-rooted tradition. For many years, some Cubans have captured and kept songbirds and organized birdsinging contests. Throughout a turbulent era of economic sanctions and political turmoil, those charming little birds provided companionship, entertainment, and a friendly festival within the community.
Today, with normalcy and emigration between Cuba and North America, songbird pageant culture has crossed an ocean. As songbird populations plummet, U. S. law enforcement is cracking down on the capture, industry and festival of those birds.
Brent Stirton stores bankruptcy in the story of a much-loved mountain gorilla in Virunga National Park at the Senkwekwe Center in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Stirton photographed Ndakasi’s rescue at the age of two months after his troop was brutally murdered by a tough coal mafia as a warning to park rangers.
Here she commemorated her death while she was in the arms of her 13-year-old savior and caregiver, Ranger Andre Bauma.
As a result of tireless conservation efforts aimed at the individual protection of gorillas, the number of mountain gorillas has quadrupled to more than 1000 in the last 40 years.