{"id":227461,"date":"2025-10-15T21:46:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T21:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/227461\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T21:46:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T21:46:09","slug":"survival-purse-wildlife-photographer-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/227461\/","title":{"rendered":"Survival Purse | Wildlife Photographer of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ralph Pace&#8217;s Image<\/p>\n<p>Ralph Pace (USA) beautifully illuminates the egg case of a swell shark, tethered to the base of a giant kelp.<\/p>\n<p>Faced with strong currents pushing him from side to side, Ralph struggled to keep steady to photograph this egg case, or \u2018mermaid\u2019s purse\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>He lit the case from behind to reveal the swell shark embryo within. Its gill slits and yolk sac are clearly visible among the dark kelp forest.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers estimate that kelp forests in Monterey Bay have declined by more than 95% over the past 34 years.<\/p>\n<p>This makes swell sharks vulnerable because they depend on kelp to lay their leathery eggs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ralph Pace&#8217;s Image Ralph Pace (USA) beautifully illuminates the egg case of a swell shark, tethered to the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[80748,79,201,126555,126554,126552,126553,126551],"class_list":["post-227461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-nature-photography","tag-science","tag-wildlife","tag-wildlife-competition","tag-wildlife-images","tag-wildlife-photographer-of-the-year","tag-wildphoto","tag-wpy-exhibition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}