Stunningly intimate octopus image wins aquatic photography prize

This alien and extraordinarily intimate image provides a rare glimpse of a Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) mother and her potential offspring at the Blue Heron Bridge dive area, off Florida’s West Palm Beach.

After mating, these solitary animals hide themselves far away to get on with the business of guarding their growing eggs. But for Octopus briareus and many other octopus species, the story has a nasty ending.

After a mother octopus lays a clutch of a few hundred eggs, she stops eating; she will die shortly after the eggs hatch. In 2022, research shed light on the process. The lifespan and reproduction of the invertebrate are controlled by optic glands, the octopus’s main neuroendocrine centre, which is roughly the equivalent to the pituitary gland in vertebrates.

The optic gland of octopus mothers undergoes a massive increase in cholesterol production after mating, which may trigger a self-destructive spiral. But the reason for this cycle is still unclear. One theory is that it stops the octopus from eating its own young.

Octopus Mother won freelance nature photographer Kat Zhou the Aquatic Life category in the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition, open to all photographers, both professional and amateur. The competition aims to celebrate and illustrate the diversity of life on Earth and prompt action to protect and conserve it.

The overall Grand Prize went to photographer and conservationist Zhou Donglin’s Lemur’s Tough Life, a terrifyingly brilliant image taken in Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve, Madagascar (shown below). After a day of hard slogging in a rugged and tricky terrain, Donglin captured a common brown lemur (Eulemur fulvus) in a death-defying leap from one cliffside to another – with her baby on board.

The next image, Mudskipping by Georgina Steytler (shown below), is a strange reminder of life’s distant past, as an eerily beautiful amphibian leaps out of the mud. A finalist in the Aquatic Life section of the competition, Steytler spent days on Goode Beach, in Broome, Western Australia, before capturing the exact moment when a blue-spotted mudskipper (Boleophthalmus pectinirostris) went airborne.

The final image (shown below) looks like it was shot on a distant planet. In fact, Embers in the Snow by plant photographer Ellen Woods – a finalist in the award’s Landscapes, Waterscapes, and Flora category – was shot near Woods’s home in Connecticut, in the north-eastern US.

It shows a skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), which is often one of the earliest plants to emerge as winter ends because of its ability to create its own microclimate, warming itself to about 23 degrees Celsius even when the surrounding air is below freezing.

This is down to thermogenesis, or the ability to metabolically generate heat. This not only protects the plant’s tissues from frost damage, but it also serves to attract beetle and fly pollinators in search of a warm carrion meal.

Less appealing is the origin of its name: it emits a skunk-like smell when its leaves are bruised.

The winning entries will be on show at California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco later this year.