Wildlife Photographer of the Year - OceansWildlife Photographer of the Year - Oceans 

This is ‘A Diet of Deadly Plastic’ by Justin Gilligan from Australia. This photograph was taken in Lord Howe Island, New South Wales, Australia, and is the 2024 category winner of ‘Oceans - The Bigger Picture’. This is a landscape format image with a black background. Within the image there's another rectangular shape made up of loads of bits forming a spread-out mosaic. It's hard to know what the things are because there are lots of shades of browns and greens and reds. At first it looks like they are quite organic; rocks or something like that, but then when you take a closer look at them, you realise they must be human, or machine-made rather than natural. There are probably a hundred or a couple of hundred of these smaller bits forming the mosaic. Starting at the top of the rectangle, the mosaic begins with very small pieces and then they get bigger as you go down. They are ordered in a very deliberate way. It's an image that is clearly human-made and thought about. It's quite considered that they've made it into this rectangular shape. None of the pieces have straight edges. They're all sort of different shapes. I feel like it would have taken a long time to sort those little bits and spread them out nicely because there seems to be an equal distance between each of them. To the left of the image is a black coloured bird that takes up the whole left-hand side from the top to bottom. The first thing that you notice is the silvery beak of the bird which is facing to the right. The bird is lying on its back, and you can see one of its wings. At first, we don’t notice the wind because it is black itself. The bird blends into the background, but you can see its tummy, or belly, of the bird. What's really shocking is that the pieces were taken from within the bird. How did it all fit? Especially when looking at the beak, which is the same size, if not smaller, than some of the biggest pieces? How did it manage to swallow all those pieces of plastic? The pieces of plastic look like they might have been weathered if the bird had found them out in the wild, but I guess it must have also been in its stomach for a while. The bird must have survived a long time. I don't think it will have eaten all of these in one sitting, so it must have had these in its belly for a while. In the bottom left of the mosaic plastic rectangle, there's a cross shape and then there are some circles with circles within them that almost look like those clips you use when you're camping, like to hold up the guide ropes. There are also green bits with stripes that look like bottle tops, and there's some other bits that look a bit like bottle tops with some sort of printing on them. We can't see how they got these bits of plastic out of the bird because the belly looks intact. So, it does make me wonder how they got them all out.