The California Academy of Sciences has revealed the winners of its BigPicture Photography Competition which celebrates Earth’s biodiversity and highlights the threats it faces.
Now in its 11th year, a stunning photo of fir trees being weighed down by monarch butterflies took home the Grand Prize.
Grand Prize Winner: “The Forest of the Monarchs” by Jaime Rojo. Streaked with sunlight and crowded together for warmth in winter, Monarch Butterflies blanket fir trees in El Rosario Sanctuary. “I requested special permits to work outside the sanctuary’s operating hours and made this photograph shortly before sunset,” says Rojo.
Dubbed The Forest of the Monarchs, photographer Jaime Rojo captured this unique image after spending years studying the iconic butterflies in Michoacan, Mexico.
Previously published on the cover of National Geographic, these rare images show monarch butterflies huddling together to conserve warmth in their remote winter habitat in Mexico’s mountainous forests.
Landscapes, Waterscapes, and Flora Winner: “In Celebration” by Geo Cloete, capturing a blanket of sea anemones blooming in a South African tidepool.Photo Story Winner: “Ghosts of the North” by Peter Mather is a 5-photo series that documents the eerie, ghostlike nature of the Arctic’s elusive wildlife.Terrestrial Wildlife Winner: “Beauty of the Desert” by Hema Palan, depicting a sand racer slithering between the branches of a bush in India’s Thar Desert.Human/Nature Winner: “Good Fire” by Maddy Rifka, showing a Hoopa Valley tribal member lighting a patch of forest brush on fire during a cultural burn.Winged Life Winner: “Underwater Harmony and Chaos” by Franco Banfi, illustrating the chaos and beauty of the Northern gannet’s daily fight for food and survival.Aquatic Life Winner: “Tadpole Migration” by Shane Gross, chronicling hundreds of polliwogs as they journey from a lake’s depths to the water’s surface in Vancouver Island.Art of Nature Winner: “Stardust Forest” by Kazuaki Koseki, fireflies illuminate a forest in Yamagata, Japan.Human Nature Finalist: “Hopeless” by Alvaro Herrero, a haunting image of this ill-fated, entangled humpback whale captures the grim reality these magnificent marine mammals face in oceans around the world.Terrestrial Wildlife Finalist: “A Moment in the Sun” by Kathleen Borshanian, showing an Arctic Blue Fox on the cliffs of the Pribilof Islands enjoying a rare moment of sunshine on the usually foggy isle.Landscapes, Waterscapes, and Flora Finalist: “March of the Spider Orchids” by Georgina Steytler, it shows a lone white spider orchid emerge from the brush in southern Australia and unfurl its spindly arms in a bid to attract a male wasp to copulate with it by mimicking the scent of a female wasp. It wants the wasp’s pollen.
These images originally appeared on bioGraphic, an online magazine about nature and regeneration and the official media sponsor for the California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition.
