Thomas Kline (USA) watches through crystal waters as pink salmon prepare to mate.
With his camera placed in a likely spawning spot on the gravel stream bed, Thomas watched the flurry of underwater activity from above. He released the remote trigger just as this pink salmon kicked up plumes of sand.
Female pink salmon use their tails to clear gravel into depressions called 'redds'. Into these each female will lay around 1,400 eggs to be fertilised. These eggs can only survive if the water is clean and oxygenated.
Of the five species of Pacific salmon, the pink salmon is Alaska's most abundant. Generally sustainably fished, it makes up more than half the number of salmon caught commercially in Alaska and contributes substantially to sport and subsistence harvesting.
USA
Photography has been Thomas' primary creative outlet since he was a teenager, when he began developing film and making prints in his darkroom. He received a PhD in Oceanography from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1991 and underwater photography augmented his dissertation research on salmon ecology. Thomas has spent much of the last two decades expanding on this by developing techniques to capture various aspects of salmon ecology and behaviour.
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