A weird {photograph} captures the second a secretary hen (Sagittarius serpentarius) closes its third eyelid because it catches a locust midflight. The picture is among the winners of the 2024 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition, which is run in collaboration with the Royal Photographic Society, and acknowledges photos exhibiting hidden scientific phenomena within the pure world.
The secretary hen was captured by biologist and photographer Peter Hudson, who was named winner of the ecology and environmental science class.
“Secretary birds are carefully associated to falcons however have developed a stork-like mode of life, the place they stalk across the savannah and feed on locusts, lizards and amphibians by punching them on the bottom,” Hudson stated in an announcement emailed to Live Science. “This hen has simply caught a locust, and because it swallows its prey, it synchronously closes its third eyelid, the nictitating membrane, throughout its eyes to guard them from harm.”
Related: Shoebill: The human-sized African hen that eats child crocodiles and kills its siblings
Secretary birds are massive birds of prey — reaching round 4 ft (1.2 meters) in peak — with an eagle-like physique that sits on lengthy, crane-like legs. They’re native to sub-Saharan Africa and, whereas they’ll fly, they spend most of their time strolling by lengthy grasses searching for meals.
Hudson’s picture reveals the hen’s third eyelid, which seems to be like a blue ball sitting within the eye socket. According to the National Audubon Society, the third eyelid sits beneath the higher and decrease lids. It’s hinged on the interior facet of the attention and strikes horizontally throughout the eyeball to maintain it freed from mud, wind and hazards — giving the eyelids the nickname “nature’s goggles.”
An aerial picture of 4 sharks searching in a faculty of fish was named total winner of the competitors. It was taken by Angela Albi, a researcher on the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany who research interactions between sharks and fish.
“Just after dawn or earlier than sunset, the shallow waters of the Maldives turn into a transparent, see-through floor,” she stated within the assertion. “These are additionally the moments once we finest observe the interactions between reef sharks and their prey. In this body, captured throughout a analysis journey in 2024, a shark on the far left shifts instantly from swimming calmly throughout the faculty to initiating a hunt, its physique posture standing out from the others. While we nonetheless do not know what triggers these assaults, we analyze movies to review how sharks hunt and the way their prey responds collectively.”
The winners from the astronomy, earth science and microimaging classes could be seen under.
