Wildlife Photographer of the Year - Behaviour, amphibians and reptiles
Audio description
Transcript
This is ‘Wetland Wrestle’ by Karine Aigner from the USA. This photograph was taken near the Transpantaneira Highway, Mato Grosso, Brazil and is the 2024 category winner of ‘Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles’. This image shows a ginormous powerful looking thick-set snake with its coils, one of its many coils, wrapped around the snout of a crocodile-like creature called the Cayman. The water is so perfectly still that the scene is reflected in the water. The Anaconda looks relaxed and the Cayman looks relaxed, even though it's obviously a fight to the death. There are two flies on top of the Anaconda on the part of its body that's wrapped around the Cayman snout, and it's clear the scene is still because the flies are just sitting there. They're not being battered away or anything, they're just happy. It's strange because this is a scene where you'd expect there to be a lot of thrashing around from the Cayman not wanting to get eaten by the Anaconda, but they're both just sat there waiting it out, seeing who makes the next move. Then, through the anaconda's coil, the Caymans snout pokes out, and you can see the one nostril, and it mirrors the one eye of the snake. I think that's quite nice. They almost look like 2 snake heads. The one thing we're being drawn towards is the water itself, which is this sludgy brown colour. Then you've got the Cayman in quite drab colours. But the thing that stands out the most is the Anaconda itself. Because even though its top side is a similar sort of brown colour, as you start making your way to the underside of this huge portion of the snake that's trying to strangle the Cayman, you have these beautiful leopard-like spots and patterns that reveal this gorgeous sunrise-esque sort of belly colour. The colour immediately makes you look towards the left-hand side of the image to see the snake’s head. The other thing I just noticed was the snake has got its tongue out. I wonder what it's doing. I guess it's the only movement in this whole picture.