These powerful images are the work of photographer , who spent nine months documenting the human and environmental cost of overfishing in South-East Asia. Since the 1950s fishing has morphed from artisanal trade to industrialised global industry. Overfishing and illegal fishing have also risen to meet rapidly increasing demand from a growing population.

Tung focused on the region because it plays a key role in the global fishing trade. Her project, funded by a €50,000 Carmignac Photojournalism Award for fieldwork, changed her stance on seafood. It isn’t about consumers giving it up completely, she says. Rather, they need to be much more aware of their choices.

It was, she adds, “harrowing” to hear stories from Indonesian fishermen describing violence they had witnessed at sea and the terrible conditions they often experienced working on fishing vessels.

The image above shows a fisher unloading yellowfin tuna at General Santos fish port in the Philippines after being at sea for a month. Bigeye tuna and blue marlin are also part of his catch.

Elsewhere, a dock worker from Myanmar (above) sorts the fish species being unloaded in Ranong, Thailand. In the below shot, Indigenous Urak Lawoi people and Thai villagers from Koh Lipe, Thailand, gather wood from nearby islands during a festival marking the end of the fishing and tourism season. They will use the material to build a ceremonial boat as an offering to their ancestors.

And in this final shot (below), a family of Filipino fishers bait fishing lines.

One of the world’s most extraordinary fish could be in danger of extinction due to a massive bloom of toxic algae engulfing parts of the southern coast of Australia.

Leafy seadragons (Phycodurus eques) are in the same group of fish that includes seahorses and pipefish. They are covered in leaf-shaped protrusions that allow them to blend in perfectly amid forests of seaweed.

Now they and their relative, the common weedy seadragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus), are being found dead in their thousands along hundreds of kilometres of the South Australian coast.

It has already been a tough few years for the animals, with enormous storms driven by the La Niña weather system resulting in the of weedy seadragons in April 2022 in Sydney alone.

Then, beginning in March this year, a massive algal bloom of the species Karenia mikimotoi broke out in Gulf St Vincent near Adelaide, South Australia. This has resulted in mass deaths of fish and other marine life, with dolphins, sea lions and even great white sharks washing up on beaches.

Surfers and swimmers have been made ill and multiple oyster harvesting areas have been closed for months. There are fears the algal bloom could continue to spread in both directions along the south of the continent.

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The South Australian government was a marine heatwave that began in September 2024, during which temperatures rose to 2.5°C above average and remained elevated in spite of the arrival of winter. Floods of the Murray river in 2022 and 2023 flushed extra nutrients into Gulf St Vincent near Adelaide, and these combined with an unprecedented upwelling of nutrient-rich water in 2023 and 2024 to worsen the situation.

State and federal governments have this week allocated AUS$28 million to tackle the unfolding catastrophe.

, an independent marine ecologist who is leading a citizen science effort to understand the scale of the disaster, says several thousand seadragons have died since the bloom began, with a greater number being weedy seadragons.

Although there are no toxicology results from seadragon carcass testing, the wash-ups coincide with the locations of harmful algal blooms, says Baker. “Seadragons have small gill pores, openings on the sides of their heads, that can easily be clogged with algae, and also, they cannot rapidly swim away from dense aggregations of bloom cells,” she says.

With so many adult seadragons killed, the pool of those able to reproduce in the late 2025 to early 2026 breeding season will be reduced. “This has implications not only in the loss of annually breeding adult animals of both species, which can continue to produce for around a decade, but includes the loss of the next generations of seadragons,” says Baker. “Thousands of young will therefore not be born in late 2025 to early 2026 in heavily bloom-impacted regions.”

at the University of Technology, Sydney, says the threat of extinction from the current event is unclear at present. “But the sheer magnitude of wash-ups over a key part of the seadragon range is of great concern.”

Weedy seadragons were recently listed as vulnerable due to population declines in Tasmania. “Now, with the South Australian event and suspected losses in [New South Wales], I fear issues with the species, but we won’t know until proper surveys are done on key dragon diver locations post-bloom,” says Booth.

at the University of Adelaide says the combination of toxic foam on beaches, algal aerosols making surfers and swimmers sick, and dead sea life washed up on beaches makes it “very obvious what we’re dealing with in terms of environmental catastrophes”. As climate change continues and sea surface temperatures increase further, we can expect to see more environmental crises like this, he says.

Many of the algal cells in the current bloom could settle into sediments ready for conditions to worsen again. “Next summer, we could see a continuation or a resurgence of this bloom,” says Keneally.

Restoring a way of life is at the heart of this photograph by Vivian Wan, part of a series that won the żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ Editors Award in the .

It shows members of the Yurok community working with biologists and technicians to set up rotary screw traps on the Trinity river, a major tributary of the Klamath river, in Willow Creek, California. The team uses fish traps to check the animals’ health and study their migration patterns.

The Klamath basin is at the heart of Yurok life, with its rich waters providing large Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), which hold deep cultural and spiritual significance to the community. But two centuries of colonisation in the region have displaced the Yurok and depleted local resources through mining, logging and the construction of dams.

Climate change and diverted river water further pushed the salmon population to the brink. In 2002, new irrigation policies resulted in tens of thousands of Chinook salmon in the Klamath River dying. This added impetus to a decades-long fight to remove the river’s dams. Last year, the final dam on the river was dismantled.

For Wan, the aim was to explore how Indigenous communities lead the battle for environmental justice. “I hope viewers come away with a deeper sense of respect for the Yurok people’s strength, culture and fight to protect Klamath basin,” she says.

Below, Hunter Mattz, a technician with Yurok Fisheries, studies a monitor showing magnified salmon scales to gain more clues about mortality rates from fishing and natural causes. The data helps set catch limits and spawning goals, as well as forecasting run size – the number of salmon that enter a river or stream during a specific period, typically in an annual migration, which is a key indicator of the health and abundance of a salmon population.

Here, Mattz holds up a needle-thin tag, which contributes data to the fish-monitoring research programme.

Mattz oversees the Net Harvesting Project. His role involved navigating a more than 70-kilometre journey from the mouth of the Pacific Ocean through the estuary, the middle of the Klamath basin and on past Blue Creek, California. This work was crucial in collecting data on fish species caught in nets and lines by local residents. The recorded data has helped secure grants for marine conservation efforts in the Klamath area.

All winners in the Earth Photo competition were chosen by a panel including żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ’s picture editor, Tim Boddy, and head of editorial video, David Stock. See the Earth Photo 2025 exhibition at London’s Royal Geographical Society until 20 August, before it tours the UK.