Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025 Winners

The annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year (WPY) competition, run by the Natural History Museum in London, consistently delivers a portfolio that is as breathtaking as it is urgent. While the 2025 contest's overall winner captured a ghostly brown hyena in a Namibian ghost town, the aquatic entries—from the dedicated 'Underwater Images' category and others—provided a look beneath the surface of the planet's oceans and wetlands. The winners, selected from a record-breaking 60,636 submissions, highlight the incredible beauty and the pressing threats facing marine life.

The Winning Glimpse: A Future in a Purse

The top prize in the Underwater Images category was awarded to US photographer Ralph Pace for his photograph, Survival Purse. The image features a backlit swell shark eggcase—often called a mermaid’s purse—tethered to the base of a giant kelp stalk in California’s Monterey Bay.

Faced with strong currents pushing him from side to side, Ralph struggled to keep steady to photograph this egg case, or ‘mermaid’s purse’. He lit the case from behind to reveal the swell shark embryo within, its gill slits and yolk sac clearly visible among the dark kelp forest. Researchers estimate that kelp forests in Monterey Bay have declined by more than 95 per cent over the past 34 years. Swell sharks depend on kelp to lay their leathery eggs, making them especially vulnerable to such losses.

Morays on the Move and Aquatic Youth

Other category winners and runners-up also put a spotlight on fascinating aquatic behavior and critical conservation issues:

• The Terrestrial Hunter: In the Animals in their Environment category, past winner Shane Gross of Canada topped the list with Like an Eel out of Water. The shot captures three peppered moray eels scavenging for dead fish at low tide on D'Arros Island in the Seychelles. This rarely-photographed behavior required weeks of attempts, eventually documenting the eels, which are well-adapted to the intertidal zone, using their keen senses to hunt both above and below the surface, sometimes remaining out of the water for more than 30 seconds.

• A Dangerous Meal: Thai photographer Tinnapat Netcharussaeng earned Runner-Up in the 15–17 Years age group for his image, Jellied Meal. Taken while scuba diving off Koh Losin in the Gulf of Thailand, the image shows a green sea turtle biting chunks out of a lion’s mane jellyfish. While an incredible natural moment, the photograph highlights a severe threat to sea life: the challenge of distinguishing between floating plastic debris and jellyfish, often leading to lethal plastic ingestion. Netcharussaeng also received a Highly Commended for a blue shark photograph, Blue Streak, taken off Mexico.

Highly Commended: Intimate Stories of the Deep

The full portfolio features several other highly commended underwater images, each telling an intimate ecological story:

• Fractal Forest: Ross Gudgeon (Australia) received a Highly Commended in the Natural Artistry category for this image of the exquisite forest-like structure of a cauliflower coral from the inside out in Lembeh Strait, Indonesia. Ross is always looking for ways to use an extended macro wide lens – an underwater version of a probe – to photograph from unusual perspectives. He carefully threaded the lens between the coral branches and backlit the scene with two flashes. Soft corals are filter-feeding invertebrates found in the Indo-Pacific and the Mediterranean. Unlike other corals, soft corals do not use photosynthesis for sustenance. Instead, each polyp-tipped branch bears feathery tentacles that comb water currents for floating phytoplankton.

• The Welcoming Turtle: US photographer Jake Stout was Highly Commended for his photo of a snapping turtle as it glides over lake vegetation in New Hampshire. Jake’s experiences with common snapping turtles contrast sharply with their fearsome reputation. Finding them to be calm and inquisitive, he has photographed them in this lake for the past four years, discovering the dramatically different personalities and behaviors of individuals.

• Musk Turtle Motel: Isaac Szabo from the USA received a Highly Commended in the Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles category for his shot of a trio of loggerhead musk turtles sheltering in the soft clay bank of a spring-fed Florida swamp. While snorkeling, Isaac rounded a submerged tree and came face to face with one of three loggerhead musk turtles. He moved slowly so as not to stir up the sediment, and recorded this moment before the turtle disappeared into its refuge. Loggerhead musk turtles are found in the southeastern United States, primarily Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida. Although currently stable, their populations are threatened by habitat loss and degradation caused by pollution and increasing water extraction.

• Fragile River of Life: Another Highly Commended image by Isaac Szabo, this one in the Wetlands: The Bigger Picture category shows longnose gars spawning in a crystal-clear Florida river. Wrapping his feet around a drowned tree, Isaac photographed this female longnose gar with several males during the mating season. The presence of the turtle was, for Isaac, the ‘icing on the cake’, as it ‘gives a sense of the whole ecosystem’. This river is one of more than 1,000 waterways fed by freshwater springs renowned for their clarity. Maintaining the aquifers that supply these springs is vital not only for iconic wildlife such as manatees, but also for providing drinking water to nearly half of Florida.

• A Rare Sighting: French photographer Greg Lecoeur, a former winner, was Highly Commended for A Monk's Life, an image of a wide-eyed monk seal inside a sea cave. Lecoeur captured the intimate encounter while documenting seal biologists in Greece, highlighting the slow recovery of one of the world’s most elusive and endangered marine mammals.

• Troubled Encounters: Swiss photographer Hussain Aga Khan’s A Closer Look framed an Amazon river dolphin, or boto, near a tourist pontoon in Manaus, Brazil. The image draws attention to the population decline of the boto and the controversial practice of tourists paying to feed the animals, which can cause them to become reliant on handouts.

• The X-Ray View: Sirachai Arunrugstichai, another Thai photographer, was Highly Commended in the Oceans: The Bigger Picture category for his unusual image, Baring The Bones. The work is not a traditional photograph but an X-ray of preserved tropical fish specimens, designed to "visualise the potential loss of marine biodiversity" from threats like ocean warming and destructive fishing practices.

• Plankton Bloom Warning: Ralph Pace was also Highly Commended for a second image, Jelly Smack Summer, which captured a mass—or 'smack'—of Pacific sea nettles in Monterey Bay. The image touches on the debate among biologists that more frequent jelly 'smacks' are potentially a sign of rising ocean temperatures or the removal of predators through overfishing.

The winning photographs will be showcased in an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London, from Friday 17 October 2025, including 19 category winners across topics ranging from underwater to urban wildlife, and photojournalism to mammal behavior.

The exhibition will also help visitors understand how our planet’s habitats are changing. Alongside the award-winning photographs, the sixty-first exhibition will provide insight into some of the habitats pictured by including the Natural History Museum’s groundbreaking metric, the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII). BII measures how much of a region’s natural biodiversity remains on a scale of 0 to 100%. Adopted as an official Global Biodiversity Framework indicator for decision-making, it is an essential tool for understanding, monitoring and communicating biodiversity changes on a global scale and tracking international progress towards conservation goals.