Scientists’ images turn fieldwork into urgency and wonder

Scientists’ images – From a flock of northern bald ibises guided by an ultralight across Europe to fluorescent mosquitoes on a lab screen, winning images from the Scientist at Work contest show how conservation, ecology, and disease research are being pursued—and communicated—thro

A cool, rosemary-scented morning in Spain carried a quiet kind of pressure. In Jaén in Andalusia, Gunnar Hartmann had been flying for days overhead—watching 36 northern bald ibises find the air, and hoping they would keep it.

The moment became the overall winning scene in this year’s Scientist at Work photography competition. sponsored by the journal Nature. Hartmann’s photograph shows an ultralight aircraft soaring beneath a yellow parachute. with nineteen birds flapping ahead of it—despite the fact that it’s the aircraft. not the birds. that the humans are piloting. Below, a golden landscape stretches out.

For the project, Hartmann’s role wasn’t just technical. The conservation and research group Waldrappteam had been nearing the end of a remarkable undertaking: escorting a flock of 36 northern bald ibises along their migratory route from southeastern Germany to the highlands of southern Spain. The species once disappeared from Europe about 400 years ago due to overhunting. A century ago. another population was found living in Syria and Morocco. and scientists brought some birds to Europe to rear their chicks in captivity so they could form bonds with human handlers. Now, the birds are being taught to migrate, guided along a 1,700-plus-mile route.

In the fall of 2024, Hartmann joined Waldrappteam for 50 days. He traveled across southern Germany, France and Spain in an ultralight aircraft as the latest group of ibises learned the route.

He remembers the shot-making as exhausting—and emotional. “They’d already been flying for days and the ibises were tired,” Hartmann recalls. “We were struggling to motivate the birds to follow the aircraft to get them to do what we wanted them to do — what they need to do to be a good migratory bird.” Eventually. though. the ibises launched themselves into the air and followed the ultralight. From a nearby hill, Hartmann positioned himself for what he called “the perfect shot.”.

When the image is no longer just a moment but a photograph, it changes the feeling. “I was part of the project — I was just living it,” he says. “And then I came out of this bubble and then I realized how it must feel to see a picture of it. There is something romantic in it.”

At the same time, the contest’s winners underline what the fieldwork is actually for: not romance alone, but the human push to understand—and intervene—when nature is changing, stressed, or slipping away.

Dog Lake’s green tide

Allen Tian, a PhD student at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, is another winner. His overhead image captures an algal bloom in Dog Lake. where the growth of phytoplankton can intensify when excess nutrients enter the water. Tian describes the blooms the way people nearby often experience them: “putrid from the ground. ” smelling awful. and looking like “pea soup. ” with a reputation for poisoning local dogs and livestock.

From above, though, his photograph becomes something stranger. The undulating green looks otherworldly. “I like to think of it as impressionist art. ” Tian says. explaining that the paint-like consistency can be pulled in different directions by wind and currents. as well as by the movements of living things. In the picture, a single miniscule boat etches a path across the chartreuse surface.

Tian’s team studies how to monitor and predict blooms, which can cause environmental and economic harm.

Microbes on a moving planet

One of the winning photographs shifts from a lake to open water. It shows a marine biologist off western Australia sampling the microbes living on the skin of a wild whale shark. The photographer. Rob Harcourt—an emeritus professor of marine ecology at Macquarie University in Sydney. Australia—described the work as leaping into the blue when a marine giant appears. “We leap into the blue when we find a marine giant,” he says. “We collect samples through immense effort that are revealing so much both about these elusive sharks and the environment they inhabit and how it is changing with human stressors such as climate change.”.

In the contest’s Red Sea image. Uli Kunz. a freelance marine biologist and photographer. documents coral under conditions designed for measurement. His winning scene shows two scientists gazing at a coral specimen on the sandy floor of the Red Sea off the coast of Saudi Arabia inside a transparent incubation chamber. where the coral’s metabolism can be measured.

Kunz says the shot depended on painstaking positioning. “I placed a diving torch behind the chamber,” he says. “Then I had to position the researchers’ heads with millimeter precision. constantly checking the image on my camera to capture the reflections in their masks and this moment of shared contemplation.”.

A fluorescent view of disease research

The final winning photograph pulls the viewer into a laboratory world—where the subject is microscopic. but the stakes are unmistakably public. In the image, Lee Haines, a vector biologist at the University of Notre Dame, peers into a microscope. She asks, “It looks like I’m traveling through space, doesn’t it?”.

She’s looking at a mosquito that has taken a sugar meal spiked with a drug. The mosquito appears mottled in neon pink and purple on a nearby computer screen. Haines explains what makes the color matter: as she shines a UV flashlight on the insect. “the fluorescent dye in her gut glows and I can tell that she’s taken the drug.”.

The goal is to test whether the compound can kill mosquitos like this one. Those insects transmit potentially lethal diseases to humans, including Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and West Nile viruses. The photograph, Haines says, captures her own sense of wonder at the moment of discovery. “It’s like I’m traveling through a galaxy on a ship that is a mosquito,” she says.

The photographer behind that image is Shayanta Chowdhury, a physical chemist at the University of Notre Dame. He said he was pleased that his work elevated Haines’ science. “Some people think scientists are in their ivory towers doing their own research and it doesn’t really benefit or impact society as much. ” he says. “But I think it does and being able to use art to showcase that in science is powerful.”.

The photographs don’t just document nature. They show how people are trying to influence outcomes—from teaching birds to migrate again. to tracking blooms that can harm ecosystems and local economies. to studying microbes and coral metabolism. and to probing drug effects in mosquitoes that spread disease.

Scientists at Work Nature photography competition northern bald ibis Waldrappteam ultralight aircraft Jaén Andalusia algal bloom Dog Lake phytoplankton whale shark microbes coral incubation chamber Red Sea UV fluorescent dye mosquito drug testing Zika dengue chikungunya West Nile