I can smell the air from this day and imagine the sounds
Each year, the world's scientists carry their work into places most people will never see — into migration corridors and coral reefs, into bloom-choked lakes and the shadow of whale sharks. Nature magazine's 2026 Scientist at Work competition, now in its seventh year, selected five images from more than 220 entries to remind us that science is not only a method but a form of presence — a willingness to stand in difficult places and pay attention. The winning photographs, taken across four continents, suggest that the emotional life of a researcher is not incidental to discovery but inseparable from it.
- A northern bald ibis — nearly erased from Europe — follows a young German student across Spain, the fragile trust between species made visible in a single frame.
- Coral reefs in the Red Sea are being fitted with incubation chambers as scientists race to understand which species might survive warming oceans, the urgency of climate crisis compressed into a diver's careful hands.
- From a Canadian lake glowing toxic green with algal bloom to the flank of a patient whale shark off Western Australia, researchers are documenting an accelerating ecological transformation in real time.
- A mosquito under ultraviolet light becomes an accidental artwork, reminding us that science sometimes finds beauty precisely where we have been taught to feel only dread.
- More than 220 entries from around the world competed, and the five chosen images collectively argue that feeling something in the field is not a distraction from the work — it is the work.
A young German undergraduate stands in a Spanish field, calling to a flock of northern bald ibis circling overhead. The birds descend — not because they are wild, but because they know him. Raised by human hands and guided by human voices across fifty days of migration from southeastern Germany to southwestern Spain, they trust him enough to follow. Gunnar Hartmann's photograph of that moment, taken during a 2024 journey with the Austrian conservation group Waldrappteam, has won Nature magazine's 2026 Scientist at Work photography competition.
Now in its seventh year, the competition draws more than 220 entries from researchers worldwide, seeking not polished results but the lived texture of science — the patience, the physical difficulty, the unexpected beauty. This year's five winning images together form a portrait of research as a fundamentally human endeavor.
Uli Kunz, a marine biologist based in Kiel, photographed divers installing an incubation chamber in the Red Sea off Saudi Arabia, part of a project studying how coral species are adapting to climate-driven temperature rise. He framed the image to hold both the urgency of the crisis and a rare moment of stillness within it. Elsewhere, a drone captured a Canadian research team collecting samples from a lake overtaken by a vivid green algal bloom. Marine ecologist Robert Harcourt documented a colleague swabbing the microbiome of a whale shark off Western Australia, the enormous animal calm as the scientist worked.
In a laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, chemistry PhD student Shayanta Chowdhury photographed entomologist Lee Haines examining a yellow fever mosquito under ultraviolet light — the insect's body rendered in unexpected colors, condensation on the Petri dish catching the light like an accidental artwork. Chowdhury saw in it a moment of visual surprise, the kind science occasionally offers in the things we are conditioned to fear.
What unites these images is not triumph or despair but attentiveness. The researchers pictured are working in a world changing faster than most can fully absorb, and they are allowing themselves to feel something in the process. The competition, by elevating these photographs, makes a quiet argument: that emotional presence is not separate from rigorous science — it is part of what makes the work real.
A young German student stands in a Spanish field, calling out to a flock of northern bald ibis as they wheel through the air above him. The birds follow—not because they are wild, but because they know him. They have been raised by human hands, guided by human voices, and now they trust him enough to follow an aircraft across a continent. This image, captured by Gunnar Hartmann during a fifty-day migration journey from southeastern Germany to southwestern Spain in 2024, has won Nature's 2026 Scientist at Work photography competition.
Hartmann, an undergraduate in BioGeoSciences at the University of Koblenz, was traveling with the Waldrappteam, an Austrian conservation organization working to reintroduce the northern bald ibis—a species nearly extinct in Europe—back into its historical range. The photograph does something that most scientific documentation does not: it holds both the technical precision of the work and the emotional weight of it. When Hartmann describes the image, he does not speak in the language of data or methodology. He speaks of smell, of sound, of the sensory memory of a single day in the field. "There are so many emotions for me," he says. "I can smell the air from this day and imagine the sounds."
This is what the competition, now in its seventh year, has set out to capture. Nature magazine's annual call for photographs seeks to document the actual texture of scientific work—not the polished results, but the messy, demanding, sometimes beautiful reality of research happening in laboratories and across landscapes. This year, more than 220 entries arrived from scientists around the world. The five winning images tell a story of science as a fundamentally human endeavor, one that requires patience, precision, and a willingness to be present in difficult places.
Uli Kunz, a freelance marine biologist based in Kiel, Germany, won with a photograph taken in the Red Sea off the coast of Saudi Arabia. The image documents the installation of an incubation chamber at what researchers call the "coral probiotics village"—a project investigating how different coral species are adapting to rising ocean temperatures driven by climate change. Kunz's framing is deliberate. He wanted the photograph to show not just the technical work of the divers, but also a moment of stillness, a pause in what is often frantic, urgent labor. The photograph holds both the crisis and the care.
Other winning images cast the net wider. A drone photograph by Haolun Tian captures a research team collecting water samples from a Canadian lake choked with a brilliant green algal bloom—a visible marker of ecological stress. Robert Harcourt, a marine ecologist, documented Michael Doane collecting a microbiome sample from a whale shark off the coast of Western Australia, the massive animal patient and still as the scientist works. And in a laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, entomologist Lee Haines peers at a yellow fever mosquito under ultraviolet light, the insect's body rendered in unexpected colors by the illumination, the condensation on the Petri dish catching the light like a small, accidental artwork. Shayanta Chowdhury, a chemistry PhD student, took that photograph and saw in it not just a specimen, but a moment of visual surprise—the way science sometimes reveals beauty in the things we are trained to fear or dismiss.
What emerges from these five images is a portrait of contemporary science that resists easy categorization. It is not triumphant. It is not despairing. It is attentive. The researchers in these photographs are doing work that matters—conservation, adaptation, monitoring, understanding—in a world that is changing faster than most of us can fully comprehend. They are present to it. They are documenting it. And they are allowing themselves to feel something in the process. The competition, by elevating these images, suggests that this emotional dimension is not separate from the science. It is part of what makes the work real.
Citações Notáveis
There are so many emotions for me. I can smell the air from this day and imagine the sounds.— Gunnar Hartmann, winning photographer
In this photo, I wanted not only to capture the research divers in the midst of their often-hectic work, but also to show a moment of quiet contemplation.— Uli Kunz, marine biologist and competition winner
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does a photograph of a scientist matter more than the data they collect?
Because the photograph shows you why they're collecting the data in the first place. You see the person, the place, the stakes. The data is abstract until you understand the human cost of gathering it.
The winning image is of someone guiding birds. That's not what we usually think of as scientific work.
That's exactly the point. The work of reintroducing a species to the wild is as much about relationship as it is about biology. The birds follow because they trust. That trust is the science.
Several of these images are about climate change—coral bleaching, algal blooms. Is the competition making a statement?
Not making a statement so much as documenting what's actually happening in the field right now. These researchers are working on the front lines of ecological change. The photographs just show that reality without editorializing it.
The mosquito photograph seems almost beautiful. Is that dangerous—making disease vectors look appealing?
It's not about making the mosquito appealing. It's about seeing it clearly. The ultraviolet light reveals something true about the organism. Understanding something fully, even aesthetically, is part of respecting the work of studying it.
What does it say that this competition has been running for seven years?
That there's hunger for this kind of documentation. People want to see what science actually looks like when it's happening. Not the press release, not the published paper—the moment itself.