A photo of a dragonfly from India won an international environmental photography contest
A photograph of an orange-tailed marsh damselfly peering through a hole in a leaf won the top prize in the annual photo contest hosted by the journals BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology. The winner was Sritam Kumar Sethi, a student at Birhampur University in India, who took the photo in the wetlands of the Indian state of Odisha, according to ABC News Australia.
The contest is open to researchers in ecology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, and zoology from various countries. Among the highly acclaimed entries was a photograph by Brandon Guel of manatees drinking fresh water in the Everglades National Park in the United States.
In the “Interactions in Nature” category, the winner was Victor Huerta Martin, a marine biologist at James Cook University. He photographed two giant cuttlefish in Spencer Gulf, South Australia: one male was blocking the other’s path to a female during the annual breeding season. The researcher took the photo in 2023, when tens of thousands of cuttlefish gathered in the shallow waters near Wayalla. According to him, these waters are now “eerily quiet,” and experts fear that an algal bloom may have caused a sharp decline in their population.
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Second place in this category went to a photo by Alvin Gardenball from the Mulligans Flat Wildlife Reserve in Australia. It shows two noisy honeyeaters chasing a brown hawk, trying to drive the predator away. In the “Protecting Our Planet” category, the winning entry was a drone photo by Allen Tian of a road connecting islands along the St. Lawrence Seaway in North America. Another honored entry shows a resident of India’s west coast helping a Ridley olive ridley sea turtle hatchling reach the sea.
Second place in the overall standings went to a photo by Ryan Wagner, in which students Alison Yates and Ellie Rounds attach a radio transmitter to a northern red-legged frog on a rainy night near Portland, Oregon. In the “Research in Action” category, the winning photo shows students dismantling a seine net at night while studying the coastal waters of New Brunswick, Canada. Other highly acclaimed photos include a self-portrait of researcher Luke Jeffrey climbing a tree in the wetlands of Australia’s Northern Territory and a photograph of a Himalayan cave taken during a search for the Himalayan brown bear.
