A pair of southern elephant seal pups playing in a rock pool on the Falkland Islands has won the top prize in the Underwater Photographer of the Year 2026 contest.<\/p>\n
Australian photographer Matty Smith’s image, titled Rockpool Rookies, beat more than 7,900 entries from around the world to claim the overall title. The image took top place in the portrait category.<\/p>\n
“Once weaned, elephant seal mothers abandon their pups ashore,” Smith said. <\/p>\n
“I watched dozens clambering over each other in shallow rock pools, awkwardly learning to swim. <\/p>\n
“On my first evening, the sky erupted in colour and I captured a handful of frames before the light faded. It was the defining moment of the trip.”<\/p>\n
Marine ecologist Dr Alex Mustard, chair of the judges, praised the shot’s split-level perspective, achieved with a custom dome port Smith built himself. <\/p>\n
“Elephant seals were hunted right to the brink of extinction. Their oil-rich blubber was used for everything from fuel for lighting to margarine,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Their recovery over the last 100 years is a great example of resilience of the ocean.”<\/p>\n
Underwater Photographer of the Year is an annual competition, based in the UK, that celebrates photography beneath the surface of the ocean, lakes, rivers and swimming pools.<\/p>\n
The competition had 14 categories, testing photographers with themes such as Macro, Wide Angle, Behaviour and Wreck Photography, as well as three categories for photos taken in British waters.<\/p>\n
Here is a selection from this year’s category-winning images.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A pair of southern elephant seal pups playing in a rock pool on the Falkland Islands has won…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-449393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}