‘Horrific and beautiful’ whale rescue image wins photography prize

Just moments after Miesa Grobbelaar photographed this endangered humpback whale being freed from a chain, the whale “stopped and looked at us, as if to thank us,” she said. The photo of the rescue effort, taken near the coast of Ha’apai, Tonga, won the grand prize in the Nature Conservancy’s Oceania 2025 photo competition.

Grobbelaar and his team of rescuers had responded to a distress call about a tangled humpback whale and found a “heavy rusty chain cutting deep into its tail,” Grobbelaar said in an announcement about his victory. They worked “carefully and silently” to free her, until the chain finally broke, she said.

Although humpback whales as a species are no longer considered endangered, with their overall numbers having recovered from low levels seen in the mid-20th century due to excessive whaling, some populations are still endangered, including those found off the coast of Tonga. These still number only in the thousands, about 30 percent fewer than before large-scale whaling.

“It’s horrific and beautiful, it’s both humanity’s relationship with nature at its worst and humanity caring for nature at its best,” Jarrod Boord, one of the competition’s judges, said in the announcement.

The competition, open to photographers from Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, also awarded prizes in other categories, such as this charming photo (above) of a Pluteus velutinornatus mushroom, which grows on wood, which won the Plants and Mushrooms category. Photographer Nic Wooding spotted the hazel-colored mushrooms just before it opened and returned a few days later to find it in “impeccable” condition.

Scott Portelli won first prize in the Land category for his kaleidoscopic time-lapse of stars above a rock face (above) in Western Australia’s Windjana Gorge National Park, known for its distinctive red rocks. It took more than 600 photos to show the stars moving across the night sky from dusk to dawn.

This vibrant photo (above) of a female peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus), taken in Bali, Indonesia, by Peter McGee, received third prize in the Water category. The shrimp guards its precious cargo of red eggs while scanning the waters around it.