For new discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines, follow NPR's Short Wave podcast .
The mood was tense one fall morning in a village in Spain.
A conservation and research group called Waldrappteam was nearing the end of a remarkable undertaking — escorting a flock of 36 northern bald ibises along their migratory route from southeastern Germany to the highlands of southern Spain.
The northern bald ibis has a ruddy bill and a crest of feathers that look like an intermittent mohawk. It disappeared from Europe some 400 years ago due to overhunting.
But, says Gunnar Hartmann, an undergraduate majoring in biogeoscience at the University of Koblenz in Germany, another population of the ibises was found living in Syria and Morocco a century ago. Scientists at the time brought some of the birds to Europe to rear their chicks in captivity where they can form bonds with their human handlers. Now scientists teach them to migrate, guiding them along their 1,700-plus-mile route.
In the fall of 2024, Hartmann joined Waldrappteam for 50 days as they flew an ultralight aircraft across southern Germany, France and Spain, showing the latest group of ibises their way.
It was on a cool, rosemary-scented morning in Spain, in the town of Jaén in Andalusia, that Hartmann, who was the project's photographer, snapped an image with his camera that would become the overall winner of this year's Scientist at Work photography competition sponsored by the journal Nature. The winners were announced Wednesday.
In the photo, the aircraft soars in the sky beneath a yellow parachute. Nineteen of the birds flap ahead of it, even though they're the ones following the people. A golden landscape sprawls below.
Hartmann is pleased to have brought attention to the conservation efforts bringing the northern bald ibis back to Europe.
"For me, this special morning was super emotional," recalls Hartmann. They'd already been flying for days and the ibises were tired. "We were struggling to motivate the birds to follow the aircraft to get them to do what we wanted them to do — what they need to do to be a good migratory bird."
But eventually the ibises launched themselves into the air and followed the ultralight. Hartmann positioned himself on a nearby hill, hoping for the perfect shot.
"I was part of the project — I was just living it," he says. "And then I came out of this bubble and then I realized how it must feel to see a picture of it. There is something romantic in it."
A watery world in technicolor
Allen Tian, a PhD student at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, is another one of the winners. He captured an arresting overhead image of an algal bloom in Dog Lake in Ontario — a massive growth of phytoplankton that usually occurs due to excess nutrients in the water.
"Even though they were really putrid from the ground and they smelled awful and they looked like pea soup and they were well known for poisoning local dogs and livestock," he says, "they were also really beautiful from the air."
The photograph is an otherworldly undulating green. "I like to think of it as impressionist art," he says. "The paint-like consistency of the algal bloom — it gets pulled in different directions by wind, by currents, but also by the movements of living things."
A single miniscule boat etches a path on the water's surface. Tian's research assistant is standing up and her shadow falls upon the chartreuse murk. The team studies how to monitor and predict the blooms, which cause environmental and economic harm.
Another winning photograph shows a marine biologist off of western Australia sampling the microbes living on the skin of a wild whale shark. The image elicits awe in Rob Harcourt who took the photograph. He's also an emeritus professor of marine ecology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
"We leap into the blue when we find a marine giant," he says. "We collect samples through immense effort that are revealing so much both about these elusive sharks and the environment they inhabit and how it is changing with human stressors such as climate change."
Uli Kunz, a freelance marine biologist and photographer, reveals a different aspect of underwater life in his winning image. Two scientists gaze upon a coral specimen on the sandy floor of the Red Sea off the coast of Saudi Arabia. It's inside a transparent incubation chamber where its metabolism can be measured.
The shot took work. "I placed a diving torch behind the chamber," says Kunz. "Then I had to position the researchers' heads with millimeter precision, constantly checking the image on my camera to capture the reflections in their masks and this moment of shared contemplation."
The tiniest of galaxies
The final winning photograph seemingly fuses the real with the imagined.
"It looks like I'm traveling through space, doesn't it?" asks Lee Haines, a vector biologist at the University of Notre Dame and the person peering into the microscope in the image.
"I am looking at a mosquito that has taken a sugar meal that has been spiked with a drug," she says. The mosquito, mottled in neon pink and purple, can be seen on a nearby computer screen. That's because as Haines shines a UV flashlight on the insect, "the fluorescent dye in her gut glows and I can tell that she's taken the drug."
Haines wants to know whether the compound can kill mosquitos like this one, which transmit potentially lethal diseases to humans, including Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and West Nile viruses.
And she appreciates that the photograph depicts her glimpsing into another world. "It's like I'm traveling through a galaxy on a ship that is a mosquito," she says.
Shayanta Chowdhury, the photographer and a physical chemist at the University of Notre Dame, was pleased to see his image elevating Haines' science.
"Some people think scientists are in their ivory towers doing their own research and it doesn't really benefit or impact society as much," he says. "But I think it does and being able to use art to showcase that in science is powerful."
Copyright 2026 NPR
