Sometimes, beauty emerges from the wildest of circumstances, just like this stunning shot of a paper nautilus gracefully adrift on a piece of ocean debris in the aftermath of Taal Volcano’s 2020 eruption.
This striking photograph, captured by 25-year-old marine biologist and amateur photographer Jialing Cai from China during a blackwater dive, has snagged the prestigious 2023 Ocean Photographer of the Year award presented by Oceanographic Magazine.
As she recounted her extraordinary underwater journey to the judges, Cai described her unexpected encounter with a female paper nautilus, a rare cephalopod species closely related to octopuses and squids.
The ethereal creature was perched upon a drifting wooden stick as she navigated through the low visibility and dense fog during her dive.
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“When I pressed the shutter, the particles reflected my light. The scene felt unusually serene following the natural disaster and reminds me of a fairy tale set on a snowy night,” she beautifully expressed in her competition entry.
Cai started bringing her camera to her blackwater dive adventures five years ago after she got hooked on diel vertical migration—the phenomenon where zooplankton make a nighttime move from the deep ocean to the surface.
“That hit me like lightning…My professor was telling me the deep sea was within my reach, that it would come to me. That realization was mind-blowing,” she said as DW News reported.
This eye-opener sparked her passion for blackwater photography, allowing her to capture the mystical beauty of the underwater world.
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