Ocean Pictures: Contest Winners Show Sea Life in Peril

Mourning a Fallen Giant

Photograph by Peri Paleracio, Marine Photobank

Left to die by poachers who cut off its fins for sale as delicacies, a whale shark lies on a Philippine beach as a woman mourns its fate. Marine Photobank named this shot the "most compelling image" of 2010 in honor of the UN's International Year of Biodiversity.

In addition to hunting, plastics pose another threat to endangered whale sharks, Earle said. The gentle giants "eat plankton. They can have their innards clogged with the plastics that they inadvertently take in when they gulp great volumes of water in the course of feeding themselves. And they get tangled in old fishing gear that was discarded or in actively floated fishing gear." (Find out about whale shark migrations.)

New to the ocean as of the mid-20th century, plastics are now overwhelming marine systems, Earle noted. In fact, plastics are changing the overall chemistry of the ocean and of the creatures that ingest them. (Related: "Plastic Breaks Down in Ocean, After All—And Fast.")

Published October 21, 2010

Lost Albatross

Photograph by Guy Marcovaldi, Projeto Tamar Brazil, Marine Photobank

A runner up in the Marine Photobank contest, this picture shows an albatross that drowned after swallowing the baited hook of a long-line fishing boat off Brazil—one of hundreds of thousands of seabirds believed to die each year as accidental bycatch.

"That's part of the cost of your tuna or your swordfish or other ocean wildlife that is caught on these long-lines," Earle said. (Interactive: Explore the impact of seafood.)

"To make [a new] albatross is not an easy thing," she added, noting that the seabirds can live as long as humans. "It takes 10 to 15 years for an albatross to start to reproduce effectively. They have one offspring a year, and not every year is a successful year. [But] they're critical to ocean ecosystems. They're part of what makes the planet work."

Published October 21, 2010

Preparing the Lines

Photograph by Maximilian Hirschfeld, Marine Photobank

In another runner-up image in the Marine Photobank contest, a fisher in Ecuador prepares to catch dorado using long-line hooks, a fishing practice that also unintentionally kills large numbers of sharks, sea turtles, and seabirds. (Related pictures: "Millions of Sea Turtles Killed Accidentally?")

"Millions of hooks go out every day. There are millions of hooks in the ocean, each one baited with a squid or small fish," Earle said. "You can feed a country with what is being used as bait to catch other fish that are considered more valuable."

Published October 21, 2010

Oil Above, Sharks Below

Photograph by Jake Levenson, Marine Photobank

Sharks swim near a Gulf of Mexico oil rig in July, roughly three months after the start of the Gulf oil spill, in a Marine Photobank contest runner-up image. (Get facts, essays, and pictures related to the Gulf oil spill in National Geographic magazine.)

"Oil spills can cause a lot of conspicuous damage," Earle said. "But the real issue here is the contribution of fossil fuels to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the consequent impact on global warming, sea level rise ... and now—perhaps more worrisome than all the others put together—the acidification of the ocean, because that gets to the chemistry of the planet."

Still, despite the sobering subjects of the photo contest, "I think that these images should be couched in terms of hope," Earle said. "I know it doesn't look like hope. But the real hope is that when people see these things they will understand that the ocean is in trouble while there's still time. And that's the bottom line, that we do not have to let [this degradation] continue."

Published October 21, 2010