Earthtouch’s Wild Oceans YouTube channel features a short film entitled “50 shaded of Nudibranch.” It features footage of nudibranchs shot on the pristine reefs of Sodwana Bay, Kwazulu Natal, South Africa and includes an encounter with a dancing marine flatworm and a pair of nudibranchs in a lover’s embrace.
52, the name for the so called loneliest whale in the ocean, may just be the whale with the most friends on social media. A kickstarter campaign is currently underway to fund a research team to find the whale and film a documentary while doing so. Image from Shutterstock.
Join Wetpixel on our trip to French Polynesia to dive with huge schools of gray reef sharks (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos) and the annual marbled or camouflaged grouper (Epinephelus polyphekadion) spawning aggregation for which its atolls are famous.
Filmmaker, photographer and passionate ocean conservationist, Richard Theiss passed away earlier this month. He was dedicated to capturing nature and underwater images that would move viewers to preserve and protect our precious natural resources. The Wetpixel community sends our thoughts and prayers to his friends and family. (Image by Amanda Cotton).
Photographic partnership David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes are to present their “Coral, Fire, and Ice: Exploring Secret Underwater Worlds” lecture at the Benaroya Hall, Seattle, Washington on 22,23 and 24 February.
Wetpixel would like to wish everyone celebrating the lunar New Year much happiness and prosperity for the Year of the Sheep (or Goat). May your celebrations be festive and your year be filled with safe diving and fantastic imaging opportunities.
A new paper published in the journal Marine and Freshwater Research has suggested that great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) only reach sexual maturity at age 26 for males and 33 for females. In addition the paper suggest that great whites grow slower and live longer then had been previously thought, with a possible life expectancy of 70 years. Aging was carried out by counting “band pairs” of growth on shark vertebrae. (Image from Shutterstock)
The Oregon Chub is officially the first fish to be removed from the list of endangered species because it is no longer in danger of becoming extinct. The tiny fish, found in the Willamette Valley, required help when the small ponds it lives in all but disappeared over the past 150 years.
DPReview has posted images of several prototype lenses on the Sony stand at the CP+ show. The new E mount lenses are designed for full-frame Sony mirrorless cameras and include the FE 90mm f/2.8 Macro G OSS and a 28mm F2 primes, the latter with 16mm fisheye and 21mm wide-angle adaptors. (Images by DPReview).
The Underwater Photographer of the Year 2015 results were announced during a ceremony at the London Dive Show last weekend. The overall winner was Nuno Sá, with his macro portrait of a seahorse entitled “50 Tons of Me”, a reminder about the commercial harvesting of seahorses. Hearty congratulations to all the winners and especially to the many members of the Wetpixel community in the rankings.