Haunting hyena wins Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest

A hyena prowling an deserted mining city and a beetle perched to witness the destruction of its forest habitat are the winners of the 12 months’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competitors. 

The two grand prize winners and 19 class winners have been introduced Wednesday by the Natural History Museum in London, which has placed on the competitors for 61 years. 

South African wildlife photographer Wim van den Heever earned the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year with Ghost Town Visitor, a night-time picture of a brown hyena among the many ruins of an deserted mining diamond mining city in Kolmanskop, Namibia. The species passes via there en path to the Namib Desert coast to hunt cape fur seal pups.

Van den Heever noticed the tracks of the rarest hyena on this planet at Kolmanskop a decade in the past, and dreamed of capturing this scene. He talked to a neighborhood safety guard, who stated the animals got here by about each 4 to 6 weeks. “Every single time I visited the ghost town I’d set up camera traps in the hope of success,” he recalled in his description of the picture. “It took me 10 years to finally get this one single image of a brown hyena in the most perfect frame imaginable. I was ecstatic.”

Andrea Dominizi of Italy received the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year title with “After the Destruction.” It’s a closeup of a longhorn beetle on a mossy log overlooking an deserted machine from a logging operation within the Lepini Mountains of central Italy. 

Nanaimo, B.C. photographer Shane Gross, who received the competitors’s grand title final 12 months, was the one Canadian class winner in 2025, capturing “Animals in their Environment”, together with his picture Like an Eel out of Water.

Gross stated he took the picture whereas on project for the non-profit Save Our Seas Foundation at D’Arros Island within the Seychelles archipelago in Africa. The island was lately established as a “no-take” marine protected space, the place no fishing and even assortment of seashells is allowed.

The objective was to doc the modifications earlier than and after safety, the impression of restoration to interchange coconut plantations with native vegetation, and the work of scientists to observe the modifications.

While the world is wealthy in wildlife comparable to sharks, manta rays, nesting sea turtles, seabirds and even big tortoises which might be being reintroduced, Gross acknowledged that these animals have been extensively photographed.

So when he first arrived, he requested scientists to point out him one thing distinctive. They pointed him to peppered moray eels slithering throughout the shore to scavenge useless fish that had washed up at low tide.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s something I’ve never seen before,'” he recalled, and set about capturing the small eels, that are not more than two fingers thick. The animals ended up being extraordinarily shy, and it took him practically the complete expedition to get the shot he needed.

Gross stated the eels usually discovered fish larger than themselves, and missing arms, had bother biting off chunks. Some would fold themselves into knots or depend on one another for leverage. He was taken by the fishes’ outstanding means to see and odor their prey each above and beneath the water.

He hopes the picture will enable viewers to admire an animal that is “not on most people’s radar.”

Many marine protected areas do enable fishing, he stated, and are sometimes established to guard particular species comparable to sharks or sea turtles. He thinks that is not adequate: “Species need an ecosystem to live in.” While on D’Arros Island, he noticed inter-reliance and connectedness of species that lived there; for instance, seabirds that hunt fish at sea, after which convey these vitamins over land, fertilizing vegetation with their guano. 

A no-take marine protected space takes this under consideration and “protects everything, top to bottom,” he stated, together with animals we do not consider, comparable to eels.

The successful images are amongst 100 chosen from over 60,000 entries that will likely be showcased in an exhibition that opens on the Natural History Museum in London this Friday. 

Canadians can see them in particular person on the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto Nov. 8, 2025 to March 29, 2026.