A small boat on the rough sea, surrounded by screaming seagulls and an imminent silhouette of a fishing vessel in yellowish-fun light. In the middle: a calm biologist at work. The winning photo of Natureannual #Scientistsatwork photo competition Is there one that slowly reveals itself. If you look closely, you discover a diving whale in the background. The maker is ecologist Emma Vogel, who photographed her colleague Audun Rikardsen during a Veldexpedition in a fjord in Northern Norway. In his hand, Rikardsen holds an air pressure rifle – not to hunt, but to shoot satellite channels on the back of orcas and humpbacks. With that they follow the diving behavior and how the animals migrate. By sometimes also collecting a small piece of tissue, they also gain insight into the health of the animals.
Compared to the dramatic scene of the winning photo, the number two looks almost everyday – but that is by no means. The recording (above) was made in the Lassen National Forest in California, by biologist Ryan Wagner, who also won a prize in the photo competition last year. You can see how Kate Belleville releases a handful of tiny frogs. The environmental scientists had captured, bathed and marked the young frogs. In this way they wash the deadly chytride fungus (Batrachochytrium Dendrobatidis) From the skin of the frogs, a fungus that is responsible worldwide for the decline of amphibians, and can accurately follow the population.
On the remote Amundsen-Scott Zuidpoolstation is the South Pole Telescope, recorded by astronomer Aman Chokshi during his fourteen months at this extremely cold place. Every day, Chokshi and his colleagues braved temperatures from no less than -50 ° C to -70 ° C to remove snow from the huge telescope and spread the moving parts, so that the device could continue to measure the cosmic background radiation from the early universe.
Under the eternal darkness of the polar night, geobiologist James Bradley and microbiologist Catherine Larose drill in Svalbard IJscores to investigate how microbes survive in extreme conditions.
Technician Lionel Favre and his colleagues braved the fog at the top of Mount Helmos in Greece to collect data with a weather balloon for the CleanCloud project, which is investigating the formation of clouds in Europe.
After a long day of fieldwork, geologist Hao-Cheng Yu returns to his cabin in the remote east of Siberia, where he works together with colleague Jiayi Wang on geological profiles near gold and copper mines.