Shark Frenzy Photo Wins Top Prize

October 20, 2004

Release from: Jeremy Lovell
Reuters

Award-winning photo: Bronze whalers charging a baitball
© Doug Perrine

LONDON - A photograph of two sharks gorging on a shoal of sardines has taken the top prize at the prestigious World Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards.

It was another in a long line of trophies for Hawaii-based marine wildlife photographer Doug Perrine whose images have graced magazines, calendars, posters, postcards and books around the world.

The dramatic picture shows the sharks gulping down mouthfulls of migrating sardines off South Africa's Wild Coast rounded up into a seething mass known as a "baitball" by a pod of equally hungry dolphins.

To get the shot, Perrine had to get in so close to the shoaled and frantic fish that the charging sharks often bumped into him in their feeding rushes.

"The judges were unanimous in the choice of "bronze whalers charging a baitball" as a spectacle of light and movement and a moment of great impact caught in a single frame," judge Roz Kidman Cox said of the winning picture.

"The photographer has chosen to capture the moment when both sharks have snatched huge mouthfuls of sardines, whose heads project out of a wall of teeth at the moment of their death," she added.

Perrine, who is filming a documentary on sharks off Hawaii, is one of the world's most respected marine wildlife photographers.

Apart from his other work, Perrine -- a previous Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner -- has also been a consultant on film projects for the National Geographic Society, the Discovery Channel and Disney.

His winning picture was selected from more than 18,500 entries.

Winner of the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year award with a picture of a camouflaged lizard was 17-year-old Gabby Salazar of North Carolina.

Although the prize money is nominal at just 16,500 pounds spread over 16 categories, the prestige of winning what is acknowledged as the world's leading wildlife photography competition is vast.

The competition has been run in its current format jointly by the Natural History Museum and the BBC Wildlife Magazine for the past 20 years, but it issued its first award in 1964.