‘Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi) in Cuba’ by Shane Gross
Conservation photographer Shane Gross often focuses on smaller, less-appreciated marine creatures – including the western toad tadpoles captured in his image ‘The swarm of life’.
Gross was named overall winner in the 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for the shot, taken after snorkelling for hours in a lake on Vancouver Island.
But across the decades he’s been exploring underwater worlds, Gross has also spent time with marine giants.
“Some of my early encounters stand out, like the first photoshoot I did with a real camera for sailfish in Isla Mujeres, Mexico,” he recalls. “Sailfish are big fish, up to 2m long, and they pop up a huge beautiful dorsal fin that looks like a purple sail.
“They were actively feeding on huge bait balls of sardines so it wasn’t just, ‘Here’s a beautiful fish swimming by’. It was the world’s fastest fish actively hunting right in front of me in the open ocean. That is a rare, special thing to see which I treasure to this day.”
‘The swarm of life, western toad tadpoles (Anaxyrus boreas)’ by Shane Gross, Adult Grand Title Winner, Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2024
While he developed a boyhood love of the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week and the film Jaws, Gross has also spent a lot of time in the water with sharks. Due to the shark fin industry, habitat loss and other threats, sharks are facing a challenging time around the world, with humanity causing far more harm to them than the other way around.
Gross is apprehensive, he says, of “telling stories as I don’t want to perpetuate fear. But the reality is that, especially when you’re dealing with big predators such as sharks and crocodiles, sometimes you have to accept there is risk.”
That includes an encounter with an aggressive Caribbean reef shark while he was diving off Nassau in the Bahamas. The shark “started taking an interest in me, circling me and starting to bump me”, he says. “You don’t want to let a shark bump you. I was using my camera to bump it back, to let it know, ‘I’m alive and I’m not something to be messed with’.
“I kept batting it away, and it kept circling back and bumping me again, probably seven or eight times, before losing interest and finally leaving.”
‘Goodbye, sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), Sri Lanka, 2012’ by Shane Gross
One of Gross’s favourite, and far less threatening, experiences came during a week spent with several pods of sperm whales in Sri Lanka.
“One image of mine that seems to have stood the test of time is a black-and-white image of the tail of a sperm whale,” he says. “I call it ‘Goodbye’ because it’s like the tail is waving goodbye as it swims away. It’s a very simple image. I often come back to the idea of trying to simplify in photography, which is very difficult.
“It’s a meaningful photo to me because I got to share that experience with my father, and because of the idea of ‘goodbye’. Are we saying ‘goodbye’ to a lot of our wildlife, with the biodiversity crisis that’s happening? I sure hope not, but it’s not always the reality.”
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