Life is all about relationships, and no less so in the animal world. As two recent UK wildlife photography contests reveal, the fleeting moments of interaction between predators, prey and parasites in the wild can be stunningly beautiful—and less bloody than you might expect.
An image of luminous image of tiny fish sheltering among the tentacles of a large lion’s mane jellyfish won the British Wildlife Photography Awards (BWPA), announced Sept. 5. Photographer George Stoyle came across the scene off the Island of Hirta, Scotland.
“At the end of one of the dives I was swimming back to the boat when I came face to ‘face’ with the largest jellyfish I’d ever encountered,” Stoyle said in the awards press release. “As I approached cautiously I noticed a number of juvenile fish had taken refuge inside the stinging tentacles.”
Other BWPA award winners include Sam Hobson’s photo of mistle thrush nesting on a traffic light in Leicester, England, and several “action” shots of animals with freshly-caught prey:
Meanwhile, the London Natural History Museum’s shortlist for Wildlife Photographer of the Year, released Aug. 31, includes another photo showing a killer whale “splitting the catch” with a fishing boat in Norway. Photographer Audun Rikardsen captured this dramatic frame split above and underwater: A killer whale and flock of sea birds crowding up to a fishing boat to get a bite of herring, just as the fishing net is pulled out of the ocean.
“Sometimes it’s the fishing boats that look for the killer whales and humpbacks, hoping to locate the shoals of herring that migrate to these Arctic Norwegian waters,” said Rikardsen. “But in recent winters, the whales have also started to follow the boats.”
Here are two more perfectly-timed images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year shortlist. A winner will be declared Oct. 18:
