BIRDS of a feather flock together聽鈥� and so do these western toad tadpoles, who were snapped massing beneath lily pads in Cedar聽Lake on Vancouver Island in聽British Columbia, Canada, by聽photographer .
Gross, whose stunning image聽The Swarm of Life won him the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2024 award today, spent hours snorkelling in the lake鈥檚 chilly waters to get his shot. He had almost given up when he discovered that 鈥渢he tadpole army was marching en masse from the deeper, safer end of the lake to the sunlit shallows to feed on algae鈥�.
The tadpoles, which are around 2.5 centimetres long in this shot, migrate every day from the lake鈥檚 depths to its shallows and gather in such large numbers to protect themselves from predators. They start becoming toads between four and 12 weeks after hatching, but only around 1 per cent of them聽survive to adulthood.
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鈥淰isually, I thought they were a simple black or dark brown before seeing them with my own eyes, but when you look at them up close they are flecked with gold and are actually quite striking,鈥� says Gross. 鈥淚 love how cute and friendly they are. If I held still, they聽would nibble on my hands, the camera, everything.鈥�
Kathy Moran, chair of the awards jury, said in an announcement about Gross鈥檚 win that the jury was 鈥渃aptivated by the mix of light, energy and connectivity between the environment and the tadpoles鈥�.
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards, which are run by the Natural History Museum, also saw Igor Metelskiy win the Animals in their Environment category for his photograph of a lynx stretching in the early evening sunshine in Lazovsky District, Primorsky Krai, Russia, below.
Metelskiy placed his camera trap near the footprints of a lynx鈥檚 potential prey, waiting more than six months before he landed this image, which he named Frontier of the Lynx. A 2013 survey put the entire Russian lynx population at around 22,500 individuals, with just 5890 in the Russian Far East, which includes Primorsky Krai.
Ingo Arndt won the Invertebrates prize for this disturbing shot of a blue ground beetle, above, being efficiently dismembered by red wood ants. Arndt lay on the ground by the ants鈥� nest in Hessen, Germany, for just a few minutes to take the picture, watching as the ants carved the dead beetle into pieces they could fit through the entrance to their nest.
By the time he got up, he was 鈥渇ull of ant鈥�, he said in the official announcement about his win.
Theo Bosboom was highly commended in the Animals in Their Environment prize for his image Strength in Numbers, above, a shot of mussels binding together to avoid being washed away, taken on the beach Praia da Ursa in Sintra, Portugal. Bosboom took this photograph with a long, thin, macro wide-angle lens known as a probe lens.
This photograph by Jason Gulley, above, was also highly commended, this time in the Underwater category. Named As Clear as Crystal, it shows a manatee mother and her calf drifting in the eelgrass in Hunter Springs, Crystal River, Florida.
Gulley has described the image as one of his favourites of the many he has taken of manatees and their calves, both for the expression on the calf鈥檚 face, and because of the hopeful story that lies behind those clear waters: after an algal bloom caused a decline in the eelgrass beds that manatees eat, the local community took action to restore the habitat and improve the water quality.
An of photographs from the competition is running at the Natural History Museum, London, from 11 October until 29 June 2025.
