“Most people are completely unaware of what is in the water,” says Julian Cremona, a naturalist and photographer who is out to change that with his new book.

Plankton is an umbrella term for all kinds of different organisms floating in our waters, from plants, known as phytoplankton, to animals, known as zooplankton. They can be as little as 0.02 micrometres, the size of some viruses, or as big as 2 metres, the size of a large jellyfish. What they have in common is that they aren’t powerful enough to overcome the movement of water, unlike organisms that can resist the current. As Cremona writes, plankton are “drifting organisms that are unable to determine their long-term direction and are at the whims of the current”.

Cremona’s book is a guide to the different types of plankton found along the British coast, such as the larva of a Magelona worm, just 2 millimetres in size, in the main image. To take this photograph, Cremona fitted objective lenses from an old microscope to his camera.

Below is a shot of a tiny zooplankter, Oikopleura. Its body is made up of a trunk on top of a long tail, ranging from a few millimetres to a centimetre long. It has a lifespan of five to six days, over which it grows, reproduces and finally dies.

Some larger plankton are shown below, including a handful of compass jellyfish (Chrysaora hysoscella), which are mostly found in northern Europe. The umbrella of this jellyfish can stretch to 30 centimetres in diameter, and it uses its 24 tentacles to catch its food: small fish, crabs and other jellyfish.

Pictured below is a swarm of moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita), the most common jellyfish to be found in the UK’s waters.

Some phytoplankton exhibit symbiosis with jellyfish and sea anemones, such as the aptly named snakelocks anemone (Anemonia viridis), pictured below. Single-celled Symbiodinium plankton live within the tissue of its green tentacles, where they perform photosynthesis and provide their host with carbohydrates. In return, the plankton receive inorganic carbon, nitrogen, phosphate – and a protected refuge in which to live.

Climate and health activist has been immortalised in a sculpture, The Solomon Siren – recently installed on her now-flooded former home: Kale Island in the Solomon Islands.

Rising tides completely flooded the 50,000-square-metre Pacific island in 2016. The sculpture sits in the intertidal zone, where patches of rubble and sand rise above the ocean surface from time to time.

Sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor made the sculpture as part of his Sirens series of installations around the world highlighting warming seas, sewage pollution and the presence of microplastics.

When flooding made life untenable, Bartlett and her family had to evacuate to one of the main islands. “Back then, [the island] was land – green, vibrant, full of life,” says Bartlett in a film accompanying the sculpture’s installation. “Kale became one of the first documented islands in the Solomons lost to sea level rise.”

The sculpture consists of a marine-grade stainless steel tree on which a life-sized figure of Bartlett leans. The artwork also uses biochar and pH-neutral cement. Hauntingly, as the tide rises and falls, it is intermittently hidden as waves roll over.

Incorporated into the sculpture are inscriptions recording past milestones of Kale’s submergence along with predictions for a sea level rise of up to 20 centimetres by 2046. But as Taylor says, the sculpture isn’t intended to work as a scientific measuring instrument, but as a “symbolic representation” of a changing relationship between land and sea.

“What happened is a warning not only for us, but for the world,” says Bartlett.

After the British ship Endurance (pictured above) became stuck in an ice sheet in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica in January 1915, the expedition’s official photographer, Frank Hurley, made a brave decision. He waded into the icy water filling the lower deck to rescue hundreds of his precious glass-plate photo negatives.

To Hurley’s dismay, Ernest Shackleton, the expedition leader, informed him he would have to abandon most of the negatives because they would weigh down their escape lifeboats. Hurley went through the plates one by one and smashed 400 of them on the ice before he could change his mind and risk his life to return for them, salvaging 120.

Hurley also had to relinquish most of his photography equipment and rely on a pocket camera and a few rolls of film to capture the crew’s fight for survival as they camped on the ice near their trapped ship for months. “It is beyond conception, even to us, that we are dwelling on a colossal ice raft, with but five feet of ice separating us from 2,000 fathoms of ocean, and drifting along under the caprices of wind and tides, to heaven knows where,” wrote Hurley in his diary.

The Endurance sank for good in November 1915. After months camped on the ice, in April 1916, Hurley and the rest of the crew took his fragile photo negatives and remaining supplies on lifeboats to the uninhabited Elephant Island. From there, realising there was little chance of rescue, Shackleton and five men took the James Caird lifeboat (pictured below) on a perilous journey of 1200 kilometres across the Southern Ocean to seek rescue in South Georgia, eventually rescuing the men (including Hurley) who had remained on Elephant Island in August 1916.

While stranded on the ice sheet in the Weddell Sea, Hurley proved to be a hardy survivor, fashioning a blubber stove from an old drum and eating the expedition’s sledge dogs when food supplies ran short. Pictured below is Leonard Hussey lifting the largest sledge dog, Samson.

Hurley, an Australian photographer, was recruited for the expedition to Antarctica after Shackleton saw a film he had made of Douglas Mawson’s earlier Australasian Antarctic Expedition, for which he was also the official photographer. Unfortunately, the Shackleton expedition never succeeded in crossing the Antarctic continent.

Now, the UK’s Royal Geographical Society, in collaboration with Shackleton’s granddaughter and others, has published (Riverside Press), a compilation of Hurley’s images that survived. It features the original glass-plate negatives alongside new, high-definition scans that uncover previously hidden faces and details, such as in the image below. Digitisation of the negative revealed a sixth crew member, hidden behind the smoke from the stove.

“The survival of these negatives through such a journey in such conditions to reach the safety of the Royal Geographical Society’s collections is extraordinary,” says the society’s president, Jane Francis, in the book. “[Hurley’s] images are an example of documentary photography at its finest. He was committed to his craft and would often put himself in danger to create the perfect image. Each of his negatives is not just a visual record of a particular moment, but a beautifully composed, carefully considered piece of art.”

The otherworldly weirdness and beauty of fungi and slime moulds are captured in these photographs, taken by Jay Lichter for his new book , a guide to the “micro marvels” of New Zealand.

The ruby bonnet fungus (Cruentomycena viscidocruenta), pictured above, gets its scientific name from the Latin words for “bloody” and “slimy” because of the sticky substance coating its stalk, which can form large droplets. “The reflections you get in these globules from a diffused flash make for an awesome shot every time, so I never get sick of shooting them,” writes Lichter.

Below is the Cribraria slime mould, which is a protist, like certain algae and amoebas.

Below is the carnival candy slime mould (Arcyria denudata), named for the pink tufts it forms during its fruiting phase. It is only 4 to 6 millimetres tall.

Lichter discovered the relatively uncommon fungus Mycena lividorubra (below) under a log in New Zealand’s Waitākere Ranges.

And finally, below is another Mycena mushroom – though this one has been targeted by mould, “almost like a bridal veil”, Lichter writes. “But that’s not all! The mould in this photo is producing droplets of guttation (excess moisture) along its threads, making for an absolutely wild shot,” he adds.

Lichter hopes to inspire readers to discover the secret life of fungi themselves. Moss and rotten wood in the forest are your best bet, but Lichter has also found stunning specimens in car parks and vacant lots. “Even the most unassuming locations are exploding with fungal life,” he writes.

Jay Lichter
Allen & Unwin Aotearoa NZ

If you are a new mother and unable to breastfeed, few places are better than Brazil when it comes to getting assistance. Milk banks, which collect donated breast milk and distribute it to mothers and babies in need, have existed since the early 20th century, but they were frequently expensive and not widely accessible. But in the 1980s, João Aprígio Guerra de Almeida, a young chemist, worked with Brazilian public health officials to redesign the country’s milk banks from the ground up, using cheap, creative solutions like repurposing hot water baths from the food industry that were 10 times cheaper than standard pasteurisation machines, or sterilising coffee and mayonnaise jars so they could be reused as milk bottles.

The Brazilian word for this imaginative problem-solving is jeitinho, says photographer , who, with the journalist Niklas Franzen, visited and reported on several of Brazil’s milk banks, like the Fernandes Figueira Institute in Rio de Janeiro.

Today, Brazil’s milk-bank system is frequently cited as one of the world’s best, providing some of the world’s cheapest and safest breast milk. It operates at a vast scale, with more than 200 milk banks – the most in the world – serving hundreds of thousands of babies. Brazil saw a more than 70 per cent drop in mortality of children under 5 from 1990 to 2015, which credited at least in part to its milk bank system.

On top of its efficiency, part of the reason for the system’s success is that it makes it easy for women to freely donate and receive milk, supported by a network of courier drivers who crisscross the country. One of these drivers can be seen delivering milk by bike in Flamengo, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro (above). “We spoke to one donor, and she said, if it wasn’t for a courier to pick up her milk, she wouldn’t do it, it would just not be possible,” says Bethge. “This would be really nice for Europe and for other countries”, to adopt, she adds.

The milk banks themselves are also multipurpose facilities, acting as holistic support centres for new mothers, collecting milk, sterilising and storing it, as well as supplying it directly to premature babies in need. All milk is first checked for large contaminating detritus, such as hair or dust, that would result in a sample being rejected (above). The milk is then warmed up and liquefied in a water bath (below), so that it can undergo more rigorous tests to ensure that it is free of biological contaminants (main image, top).

Women can also receive assistance from nurses to help express milk for their babies if they are in need, such as in wards for premature births (below).

“You see the whole circle, from the woman who was delivering [the milk] to the baby who gets it,” says Bethge.

Poaching and a changing climate forced the northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita) out of the northern foothills of the Alps around 400 years ago. But now they are on their way back.

This photograph shows Helena Wehner flying in the passenger seat of an ultralight aircraft, singing a German song through a megaphone to guide the birds on their way to their new winter homes. Wehner, behind pilot Johannes Fritz, is part of an Austrian conservation group known as Waldrappteam – named after the ibis’s local name – which is trying to establish a healthy European population once more.

The birds are hand-raised by human carers and form bonds, which means they are happy to follow people even when they are riding in the aircraft. Since its inception in 2004, the migration project has amassed numerous followers and fans from local communities along the birds’ route. The 50-day journey covers 2800 kilometres from south-east Germany to south-west Spain.

The stunning shot of the formation flying over the olive groves of JaĂ©n in the south of Spain was taken by student Gunnar Hartmann and won him the overall top spot in . Hartmann joined the conservation team as a volunteer in 2024 while a science undergraduate at the University of Koblenz in Germany. In an announcement about the awards, Hartmann said the image brought up “so many emotions” for him. “I can smell the air from this day and imagine the sounds,” he added.

Other winning photographs in the 51¶ŻÂț At Work competition include this image from deep in the Red Sea off the Saudi Arabian coast, below, taken by marine biologist Uli Kunz. It shows scientists installing an incubation chamber over a coral reef ecosystem. The project aims to understand how different corals – Acropora here – react to rising water temperatures caused by climate change by measuring their oxygen output.

The winning image below, taken by Robert Harcourt, shows biologist Michael Doane holding his breath and diving down to carefully skim the skin of a whale shark (Rhincodon typus) with a syringe at Ningaloo Reef off the coast of Western Australia, collecting a sample of the microorganisms that dwell there.

Another winning aquatic image, this time shot from above, shows algal blooms on Dog Lake in Ontario, Canada. The Microcystis aeruginosa and Dolichospermum flos-aquae create a “toxic, vile-smelling layer of rot” on the lake each summer, according to photographer Haolun (Allen) Tian, a PhD student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. The thick green bloom kills fish and clogs water supplies. The boat in the image, shown below, contains scientists taking water samples for environmental DNA analysis.

Finally, photographer Shayanta Chowdhury captures an entomologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana observing a yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) under a microscope, below. 51¶ŻÂțs are studying how the drug nitisinone can be used to kill blood-feeding insects, and the mosquito has been fed a sugar mixture spiked with both the drug and a fluorescent dye.

This oasis (above) next to the town of Mao, Chad, allows farmers to grow date palms and cultivate a few crops in the small fields around it. But rising temperatures due to climate change are a growing threat to oases such as this, and to the people and wildlife that depend on them.

The image is part of a series shot by photographer Tommy Trenchard for the photo essay “, which explores how these fragile ecosystems are disappearing. As temperatures rise, vegetation is retreating around oases and sand dunes are encroaching upon them. To try to hold back the sands, farmers in villages such as Kaou, also in Chad, are building barriers from palm fronds, as shown in the images below.

Mao and Kaou are located in the Sahel region, the semi-arid belt south of the Sahara desert that stretches right across Africa, from Mauritania to Eritrea. In 2007, the African Union launched the Great Green Wall initiative to try to prevent the desertification of the Sahel.

As part of this initiative, solar-powered water pumps have been installed in places such as Barkadroussou (below), not far from Mao in Chad, to help farmers irrigate crops. But the Great Green Wall initiative is controversial, with many questioning whether it will work.

Even where measures such as building barriers or installing boreholes do make a difference, with temperatures set to rise higher still, it is far from clear that oases like these will remain oases for much longer.

In the parched terrain of Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, the spiderweb of animal tracks that splay out from an ancient acacia, known as the Tree of Life, are reminiscent of roots. The scene is a reminder of the fragility of life’s connection to water.

Animals come from far and wide to shelter under the shade of this solitary tree. The most marvellous thing about water is the infinite ways that life responds to it – a tree sends down roots, a canopy grows, animals converge, a landscape is marked.

This image was captured by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, author of the bestselling photo book The Earth from Above, published in 1999. It is included in his new book, (out 11 June), a look at the world through the lens of its freshwater systems, co-written with biologist Bill François.

François says the tree shot is an “iconic picture from Yann’s work”. “A tree can spread 400 litres of fresh water a day in the surroundings by leaves’ transpiration,” he says. “And in its shade, temperature drops by 5°C. The tree is helping underground water reach the surface of the Earth and nurture life, acting as a living water well.”

Freshwater explores the scarcity of perhaps our most precious resource, which can sometimes seem plentiful and limitless. We may think that we live in a water world, but, as the authors point out and the images in the book demonstrate, water – especially fresh water – is actually the thinnest skin on what would otherwise be a barren, dry and lifeless planet.

“Let’s imagine for a moment that all the water on our planet was gathered into a single drop,” they write. This drop would be 1385 kilometres in diameter, representing over a million cubic kilometres of water. “At first glance, this seems enormous, beyond what we can imagine,” they write – yet this is less than the distance from Paris to Rome.

In reality, the sight of this drop of water, illustrated in Freshwater next to the scale of Earth, is sobering. Even more dramatic is the minuscule, full-stop’s worth of fresh surface water – this drop would be a mere 56 kilometres in diameter.

“If Earth were the size of a hot-air balloon, this fresh surface water would fit inside a wineglass. Tropical forests, civilizations, and living beings—from earthworms to giant sturgeons—depend on this small drop, representing less than a thousandth of the total water on Earth,” the authors write.

Below is another shot from Freshwater, of white pelicans in the Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary, Senegal.

“This park is a mangrove ecosystem, so a very important place for many species, at the interface between salt water and fresh water. It plays a particularly vital role for juvenile saltwater fish. Two thirds of fish caught in the world’s marine fisheries have grown in an estuary,” says François.

“Like many other places, this estuary is threatened by the human activities impacts on the river,” he says. “In this case, damming of the river and draining of nearby plains for agriculture led to an overgrowth of water plants that clogged the ecosystem and created a mosquito and water snails invasion.”

Above is another river snapped by Arthus-Bertrand, this time on the Auyån tepui in the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela. Below is his photograph of a waterfall on BrÄsvellbreen glacier on Nordaustlandet Island, Norway.

The beauty of fresh water comes from the complex interplay of its molecules’ physics and chemistry. Salt and air dissolve in it; animals can swim in it; ice floats when other frozen substances sink; and it forms a solid, a liquid and a gas. All three of these phases – running rivers, vast and exquisite lakes, glaciers, polar ice caps, storm clouds and fog – have been the playthings of poets and artists for thousands of years.

Like many beautiful things, however, fresh water can also be transient, altering the appearance of a landscape in scales that span seconds as well as millennia. “A drop of water remains in the atmosphere for a short period, about ten days, compared to several thousand years in the ocean,” the authors write. “Therefore, it is quite rare for a drop to have the chance to end up in the sky; this happens on average every 2,737 years.”