Wildlife Photographer of the Year - WetlandsWildlife Photographer of the Year - Wetlands 

This is ‘The Swarm of Life’ by Shane Gross from Canada. This photograph was taken in Vancouver Island, Cedar Lake in British Columbia, Canada and is the 2024 category winner of ‘Wetlands: The Bigger Picture’. It has also won the overall title of wildlife photographer of the year. Imagine yourself in an alien rainforest. Where you are standing on the ground and looking up at the canopy above, surrounded by really orange, wavy stems. They are the stems of lilies, and they're surrounded by hundreds and thousands of developing tadpoles. Some of the tadpoles have quite round bellies. Some have little legs poking out. There's so many of them, all heading in the same direction, from right to left, with purpose. Something within all of them is telling them to go in this one direction as part of an epic migration that they are about to embark on. There is beautiful sunlight penetrating the surface of the water. You can also make out the trees that are above. Dense lily roots fill the right-hand side. There are so many that there's a wall of them. The lens that the photographer is using has bent the image. It's almost making the tadpoles swim towards the centre to begin with, before they slightly turn to the left, but it bends because of the lens’ wide angle. You can see that the reeds in the middle are straight and the reeds to the side are bending, and that's because of the lens. That just gives it so much depth and it gives a lot more energy to the journey. It gives a wonderful sense of light and movement as well. The colours of the tadpoles are almost iridescent. Like a rock or mineral that's got really brilliant blues and silvers and are sparkling. For the tadpoles that are closest to the camera, you really pick up those details. The sort of speckled, almost semi-precious metal kind of effects, which goes to show you these aren't just bland animals, they're very ornate in their own way.