As well as being an art form, photography is an important tool used by researchers to document their observations. Earlier this year, BMC Ecology launched its second image competition to showcase images of the natural world. Now we have the great pleasure of unveiling the winners.
“The best work often shows that new phenomena – sometimes startling, sometimes beautiful and sometimes both – are always there to be found with the keenest eye, the sharpest act of attention” explains Casper Henderson and his fellow judges.
Images hold scientific value through capturing fascinating interactions and ecological events, whether depicting an intimate encounter between a mother albatross and her chick, or capturing a Phorid fly trying to parasitise a Carpenter ant.
Our image competition was open to everyone affiliated with a research institution, and the winners were chosen by BMC Ecology’s Section Editors and our guest judge, journalist Caspar Henderson, author of Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary.
Choosing a winner is a difficult task, but in the accompanying editorial, the judges explain how they decided on their frontrunners. Click on the links below to browse through the winning entries, together with some of the most highly commended images that did not quite make it to winning the top prize.
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- Overall winner – a sticky snack for mice by Petra Wester
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- Runner up – Laetizia Campioni
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- Editors’ Pick – Laetitia Kernaleguen
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- Behavioural and Physiological Ecology winner – Bernardo Segura
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- Community, Population and Marcoecology winner – Andrew J. Crawford
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- Conservation Ecology and Biodiversity Research winner – Catherine Kim
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- Landscape Ecology and Ecosystems winner – Benjamin Blonder
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- Theoretical Ecology and Models winner – Kyle Harrington
All of these winning images have been released under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY), so please feel free to share or reuse them as much as you like after attributing the image author.
To find out more about the overall winning photograph, your can head over to the BMC Series blog to read an accompanying interview with the photographer, Petra Wester from Heinrich-Heine-UniversityDüsseldorf. Find out how she captured the first evidence of a mouse pollinating a lily.
Over the coming weeks keep your eyes peeled on the BMC Series blog, as we’ll be posting more of the stories behind these fantastic images in interviews with the category winners.
Alanna Orpen
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