UPY 2025

UPY  Behaviour - Commended
'Double trouble'
Simon Lorenz

Two Fin Whales, the second largest animal in the world, captured lunge feeding into a ball of herring in Northern Norway. This behaviour has never been captured before as fin whales are known to mainly feed on krill rather than fish. These fastest of the whales lunge at crazy speeds into the bait ball, trying to capture as much fish as possible in their large expanding mouth cavities. My group had been tracking an Orca pod for several hours, hoping they would dive and bring up a bait ball. In the distance we saw the fin whales once, in hindsight they might have been tracking the same pod. When the Orca finally made a bait ball it took our swimmers by surprise to have giant whales breaching all around us. This image was a close situation, with the whales passing by me at full speed at arm length.

Judge's comment: An incredible moment of a pair of whales lunging, mouth’s agape into a school of herring. The challenging low light levels in the Arctic, in winter, limited the image quality of this amazing photo, the only thing stopping it finishing much higher.
Alex Mustard