Whale Tagging at Dawn and Other Stunning Photos of Science in the Wild

Just before dawn, under a bruised Arctic sky, gulls screamed over the freezing waters of a Norwegian fjord. Below them, a biologist stood on the edge of a boat, gripping an airgun. He was scanning the horizon, waiting for the moment a whale would breach the surface.

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The moment, captured by Emma Vogel, is the winner of Nature’s 2025 Scientist at Work photography competition. And it’s more than just a beautiful image. It’s a reminder that science isn’t just labs and computer work. Sometimes it’s sea spray in your eyes and the scent of whale breath in the wind.

A whale of a photo

Every year, Nature’s Scientist at Work photo competition showcases stunning examples of science in action. Now in its sixth year, the competition invites scientists and researchers from around the world to submit images that capture the striking, surprising, and often grueling realities of their work. This isn’t science staged for the camera; it’s science caught in the act.

The winning photo isn’t just visually stunning, it tells a story. Taken by Emma Vogel, a postdoctoral researcher and spatial ecologist at the University of Tromsø in Norway, it shows her advisor and collaborator, biologist Audun Rikardsen, on the hunt for whales.

Rikardsen isn’t actually hunting whales, of course. Their work involves tailing fishing vessels through the fjords of northern Norway, where herring gather in great numbers. The herring attract hungry giants: killer whales and humpbacks. Rikardsen’s job here is to tag these whales using a satellite-equipped dart fired from an airgun. The tags track the animals’ movements, dive depths, and surface patterns. Sometimes, they even take biopsies—tiny samples of skin and blubber used to monitor whale health.

“It feels quite calm,” Vogel says of the photo. “I’m used to so much going on during fieldwork. It seems very thoughtful, and breathing,
and just taking a moment.”

The winning photo, with a biologist braving Arctic waves to tag whales at dawn, is a perfect example of science in the thick of it—immersed in the untamed world it seeks to understand. If you look closely, you can even see a killer whale surfacing in the background of the image, framed by the metal rail behind Rikardsen; this eluded the judges when they first looked at the submission.

“You could smell their breath,” says Vogel. “And you could hear them before you can see them, which is always quite incredible.”

From Whale Song to Cosmic Whispers

A continent and a hemisphere away, a different kind of fieldwork unfolded at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. There, beneath an aurora-lit sky, the South Pole Telescope (SPT) waits patiently for whispers from the Big Bang.

Aman Chokshi, now a postdoc at McGill University, spent 14 months at the station during his PhD at the University of Melbourne. Each day, he and colleague Allen Foster would walk a kilometer in temperatures plunging to –70 °C, just to clear the telescope of snow and keep its gears moving properly.

They endure it to measure the cosmic microwave background—the oldest light in the universe. This data helps scientists understand the early moments after the Big Bang and probe the fundamental structure of the cosmos. But it’s not an easy job.

There’s no smell, zero humidity. The air’s bone dry. When the researchers finally got back to New Zealand, they went straight to the botanical gardens, just to smell greenery again.

A Fistful of Frogs

Not all heroic science takes place on icy peaks or freezing seas. Some of it happens underfoot, in the forest detritus of Lassen National Forest in California.

That’s where Ryan Wagner, a PhD student at Washington State University Vancouver, snapped a photo of environmental scientist Kate Belleville cupping a handful of tiny froglets.

These frogs are survivors—bathed in an antifungal solution and released back into the wild. The culprit: chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), a lethal pathogen ravaging amphibian populations worldwide. The researchers are trying to protect them.

The frogs are too small to wear satellite tags like the whales, so researchers use an ingenious workaround: elastomer dyes injected under the skin. They glow under black light, giving each frog a unique ID.

They’re small animals, and easy to miss. “If you weren’t looking for frogs, you might think that it’s a cricket hopping out of your way,” says Wagner. “But they’re tiny little frogs. And so, we catch them carefully.”

Drilling Through Darkness

Meanwhile, on the icy archipelago of Svalbard—north of mainland Norway, science continues even when the sun doesn’t rise.

In a photo taken by Dagmara Wojtanowicz, two researchers—geobiologist James Bradley and microbiologist Catherine Larose—are seen drilling into ancient ice under the eerie half-light of polar night.

For roughly two months each winter, the sun never climbs above the horizon in Svalbard. But Bradley and Larose press on, collecting ice cores to study how microbes survive and adapt to darkness and extreme cold.

Wojtanowicz is a research technician who’s lived in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, for eight years. It’s the world’s northernmost settlement with a population greater than 1,000. Wojtanowicz captured a haunting moment that looks more like a still from a sci-fi film than a scientific expedition.

The question they’re chasing is profound: how do microbial ecosystems persist under such extreme constraints? And by extension, what does that tell us about possible life in other icy worlds?

Fog Chasers and Firelight

Fog is usually a nuisance for fieldwork. But for Lionel Favre and his team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), it was the entire point.

Their work atop Mount Helmos in Greece is part of CleanCloud, a Horizon Europe-funded initiative to understand cloud formation. After waiting nearly a month in too-good weather, they finally got their fog.

At dawn, Favre and postdoc Michael Lonardi launched a tethered weather balloon into the mist. The balloon lifted instruments to various altitudes, collecting data on aerosols and moisture.

They stayed up there for 15 hours, then packed it all in and hiked back down.

Watching Rocks and Dreaming of Gold

The final winning image, snapped by Jiayi Wang, has the quietude of a postcard—until you learn what’s really going on.

In it, economic geologist Hao-Cheng Yu returns to a remote cabin after a day surveying eastern Siberia. The fire glows behind him, the stars spill overhead. It looks peaceful. But Wang, a PhD student at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, explains that it can be monotonous and isolating.

“There’s no network there. And the only thing you can do is watch the rocks.”

But those rocks hold promise. This region contains deposits not just of gold, but copper and tungsten—strategic metals with roles in electronics, infrastructure, and clean tech.

Field geologists like Yu often spend years mapping these mineral-rich zones, combining boots-on-the-ground exploration with high-tech geochemical analysis. Their work informs where and how mining companies invest—and how extraction can be done with minimal ecological damage.

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Images like these help rebuild trust in science by showing the dedication, courage, and humanity of the people behind the research. They remind us that science isn’t abstract—it’s driven by real people chasing truth in the most challenging places on Earth.

Science doesn’t only happen in labs. It’s out in the mud, on the ice, under the stars. It’s happening at the ends of the Earth—and the edges of human endurance.

Each of these six photos captures a different facet of that reality: a moment of wonder, tension, exhaustion, or delight. Together, they tell a larger story—of how knowledge is built one cold day, one boat trip, and one data point at a time.