Dramatic aerial shot of hunting sharks wins Royal Society Publishing Photography Prize
04 December 2024A bird’s-eye view of four sharks and their schooling prey has been announced as the winner of the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2024.
The competition, run in association with the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) this year, celebrates incredible images that shed new light on hidden scientific phenomena around us.
This year’s overall winner, from the behaviour category, is The hunt from above by Dr Angela Albi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, who studies the predator-prey interactions of sharks and schools of fish.
“Just after sunrise or before sundown, the shallow waters of the Maldives become a clear, see-through surface,” she 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.”
The project is part of a collaboration with the University of Konstanz and the MaRHE Center.
Hugh Turvey, Science Committee Chair at the Royal Photographic Society, was a member of this year’s judging panel.
“From the photographers’ bird’s-eye perspective, the raw instincts of nature come alive, as the school of fish move in almost perfect synchrony then split to avoid the sharks,” he said. “The contrast between the collective movements of the fish and the sharks’ calculated group pursuit perfectly demonstrates the delicate balance between predator and prey.”
The competition invites entries across five scientific categories:
- Astronomy
- Behaviour
- Earth science and climatology
- Ecology and environmental science
- Microimaging
The overall winner takes home a grand prize of £1000, and winners of each category each receive £500. This year, category winners are also awarded a year’s membership to the Royal Photographic Society.
The winners of the four remaining categories were selected out of more than 500 entries.
Astronomy: Heart and Soul by Imran Sultan. “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.”
Earth science and climatology: Ice cap melt lake in Greenland by David Garcia. “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.
Ecology and environmental Science: Secretary bird gullet by Peter Hudson. “Secretary birds are closely related to falcons but have evolved a stork-like mode of life, where they stalk around the savannah and feed on locusts, lizards and amphibians by punching them on the ground. This bird has just caught a locust, and as it swallows its prey it synchronously closes its third eyelid, the nictitating membrane across its eyes, to protect them from damage.”
Microimaging: Tired eyes by Jose Manuel Martinez Lopez. “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.