Piercing crocodile close-up wins ecology photo competition

Most animals would be afraid to go near a crocodile, but biting flies have no qualms about landing on this fearsome predator and drinking its blood. This photo, taken by Zeke Rowe in Panama’s Coiba National Park, was chosen as the overall winner of the British Ecological Society’s annual Capturing Ecology photography competition.

“This crocodile was lurking in a tidal marsh off the beach,” said Rowe, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, in a statement. “I got as close and low as I dared, waiting for that direct eye contact.”

The judges also selected 10 category winners, including this shot by Willem Kruger, a South African-based photographer, which won in the interactions category. During the dry season in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park on the border between South Africa and Botswana, flocks of birds were drinking at a waterhole when a pride of lions approached, scaring the birds away.

Jamal Kabir at the University of Nottingham, UK, won in the animals category with this image of a Wallace’s flying frog (Rhacophorus nigropalmatus). These amphibians, named for the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, use their webbed feet to glide between trees in the rainforests of South-East Asia.

A bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) in the Rocky mountains has its nose swabbed in this photo by Peter Hudson, a photographer and biologist at Penn State University, which was highly commended in the ecologists in action category. Pneumonia is a major issue for bighorn herds, often wiping out young lambs in the spring. Researchers suspected that asymptomatic adults were spreading the disease to vulnerable youngsters, so they implemented a campaign to test wild sheep and treat the infected individuals. This helped to reduce mortality and let populations recover.

In the mountainous Altos de Cantillana nature reserve in Chile, wildlife photographer Francisco Gamboa captured this photo of a fly resting on a mushroom, which won in the plants and fungi category.

In another highly commended image from the ecologists in action category, taken by wildlife researcher and photographer Liam Brennan, three undergraduate students are using a beach seine – a type of fishing net – to count coastal fish species in New Brunswick, Canada, as part of a project monitoring seasonal population changes.

Insect and ecosystems expedition safari: Sri Lanka

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