Haunting hyena wins Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest

A hyena prowling an abandoned mining town and a beetle perched to witness the destruction of its forest habitat are the winners of the year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

The two grand prize winners and 19 category winners were announced Wednesday by the Natural History Museum in London, which has put on the competition for 61 years.

South African wildlife photographer Wim van den Heever earned the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year with Ghost Town Visitor, a night-time photo of a brown hyena among the ruins of an abandoned mining diamond mining town in Kolmanskop, Namibia. The species passes through there en route to the Namib Desert coast to hunt cape fur seal pups.

Van den Heever spotted the tracks of the rarest hyena in the world at Kolmanskop a decade ago, and dreamed of capturing this scene. He talked to a local security guard, who said the animals came by about every four to six weeks. "Every single time I visited the ghost town I’d set up camera traps in the hope of success," he recalled in his description of the photo. "It took me 10 years to finally get this one single image of a brown hyena in the most perfect frame imaginable. I was ecstatic."

Andrea Dominizi of Italy won the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year title with "After the Destruction." It's a closeup of a longhorn beetle on a mossy log overlooking an abandoned machine from a logging operation in the Lepini Mountains of central Italy.

Nanaimo, B.C. photographer Shane Gross, who won the competition's grand title last year, was the only Canadian category winner in 2025, capturing "Animals in their Environment", with his photo Like an Eel out of Water.

Gross said he took the photo while on assignment for the non-profit Save Our Seas Foundation at D'Arros Island in the Seychelles archipelago in Africa. The island was recently established as a "no-take" marine protected area, where no fishing or even collection of seashells is allowed.

The goal was to document the changes before and after protection, the impact of restoration to replace coconut plantations with native vegetation, and the work of scientists to monitor the changes.

While the area is rich in wildlife such as sharks, manta rays, nesting sea turtles, seabirds and even giant tortoises that are being reintroduced, Gross recognized that these animals have been widely photographed.

So when he first arrived, he asked scientists to show him something unique. They pointed him to peppered moray eels slithering across the shore to scavenge dead fish that had washed up at low tide.

"I thought, 'Wow, that's something I've never seen before,'" he recalled, and set about capturing the small eels, which are no more than two fingers thick. The animals ended up being extremely shy, and it took him nearly the entire expedition to get the shot he wanted.

Gross said the eels often found fish bigger than themselves, and lacking arms, had trouble biting off chunks. Some would fold themselves into knots or rely on each other for leverage. He was taken by the fishes' remarkable ability to see and smell their prey both above and below the water.

He hopes the photo will allow viewers to admire an animal that's "not on most people's radar."

Many marine protected areas do allow fishing, he said, and are often established to protect specific species such as sharks or sea turtles. He thinks that's not good enough: "Species need an ecosystem to live in." While on D'Arros Island, he observed inter-reliance and connectedness of species that lived there; for example, seabirds that hunt fish at sea, and then bring those nutrients over land, fertilizing plants with their guano.

A no-take marine protected area takes this into account and "protects everything, top to bottom," he said, including animals we don't think of, such as eels.

The winning photos are among 100 chosen from over 60,000 entries that will be showcased in an exhibition that opens at the Natural History Museum in London this Friday.

Canadians can see them in person at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto Nov. 8, 2025 to March 29, 2026.