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Photography

Looks Fishy: Andrey Savin Greets Marine Denizens in His Vibrant Underwater Portraits

Skirting the sandy sea floor or floating amidst anemone fronds, the subjects of Andrey Savin’s portraits can’t help but act a little fishy. The photographer meets most of the marine species in the waters around where he lives in the Philippines, fascinated by their enigmatic habits and unique interactions. “The most interesting moments for me are when I observe relationships between living creatures of the same species or interspecies relationships,” he tells Colossal. A finalist for the 2022 Close-Up Photographer of the Year contest, he highlights each individual’s distinctive traits, from snaggleteeth to speckled scales, and their remarkable aquatic home.

Savin is currently working on a project investigating how to take high-quality video with smartphones underwater, along with a continuing focus on capturing animal behavior. You can find more on his website, Instagram, and Behance.

 

 

 

Craft

Crochet Your Next Big Catch with Free Patterns from the National Park Service

If angling isn’t your strong suit, the National Park Service has a solution to reeling in your next big catch. Swap your fishing line for yarn and crochet a halibut or walleye with simple patterns courtesy of ranger Hailey Burley. Referencing the aquatic inhabitants of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve and Voyageurs National Park, the DIY projects to offer a playful way to engage with the environment and the creatures living in these regions.

The two freshwater fish are part of a growing collection of patterns designed by rangers, including a round, ridged pillow to mimic the lava flow of El Malpais National Monument and another to stitch the crustacean known as Triops.

Burley tells Colossal that she’s working in Glacier Bay National Park this summer and hopes to release additional patterns reflective of the Alaskan environment. Keep an eye on the service’s site for updates.

 

Photography

Motherly Sacrifices and Aquatic Angst Top This Year’s Ocean Art Photography Contest

As they care for their unhatched babies, female octopuses refuse to eat, causing them to die of starvation before their young emerge from their eggs. Kat Zhou documented one of these marine mothers as she was in the process of such a fatal sacrifice, and the photo won the Ocean Art 2022, the 11th annual contest hosted by Underwater Photography Guide.

Zhou’s image was chosen from thousands of entries submitted from 96 countries, and the intimate photo joins a collection that encompasses a vast array of aquatic life and antics. Two aggressive pike blennies go head to head, a frog flashes a peace sign, and a menacing parasite hunts for its next victim. Find some of our favorite images below, and see all of the winning photos on the contest’s site.

 

Art

Tons of Discarded Fishing Nets Are Formed into the Wildlife They Entangle in Sculptures by Ghost Net Collective

A fishing net that has been lost or abandoned is known as a ghost net, one of the more formidable elements of “ghost gear,” which includes an array of traps, lines, pots, and other equipment discarded or no longer in use by the fishing industry. Due to their vast size, nets pose an ongoing threat to marine wildlife that get tangled in the synthetic mesh and to coral reefs that are smothered by them. Ghost Net Collective, an Australian cross-cultural group of artists who began working together at Erub Arts in 1996, seeks to educate viewers about what co-founder Lynnette Griffiths calls the “silent predator” of the ocean. Incoming Tide, a new exhibition of work by ten artists at JGM Gallery, dives into the story behind this enormous threat to marine wildlife.

Ghost Net Collective first began to work together in Erub, an island off the tip of Queensland in the Torres Strait. Home to around 400 Indigenous Erubam le, or Erubian people, from four different tribes, the island has a longstanding tradition of seafaring and fishing that has shaped its inhabitants’ lives for centuries. While derelict fishing gear bypasses Erub most of the time, in places where the tidal stream washes up, the situation for wildlife and the safety of shorelines can become much more precarious. “The western edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria gets huge amounts of net which drift down from Indonesia,” Griffiths explained in an interview with JGM Gallery.

The artists regularly partner with plastic retrieval nonprofits or the Australian Navy to source nets from beach-clean operations, and the group’s mission is to illustrate the perilous and damaging effects of plastic waste in oceans. Artists stitch vivid meshes and threads around metal frames into the forms of marine creatures endemic to the Australia coastline like stingrays or sharks.

In Incoming Tide, animals sail together through the space as if riding the same current, buoyant in bright hues and vibrant patterns as they convey an urgent message. “Some countries are still using gillnets,” Griffiths explains. “Those are nets set with radio beacons and they’re baited. They can be kilometres and kilometres long. When they become rogue nets, they just start fishing themselves.” By shaping marine animals from the salvaged materials in motifs resembling coral reefs or schools of fish, the artists hope to shed light on the immense impact of ocean plastics on marine ecosystems and the climate crisis.

Incoming Tide is on view in London through November 4, and you can find more information about Ghost Net Collective on Facebook.

Illustration

Undulating Lines and Geometric Shapes Comprise a Minimally Illustrated Menagerie

In Surf & Turf, designer Adam G., who’s behind the Santa Monica-based studio TRÜF Creative, transfers his signature messymod style from typography to biology. The ongoing illustrated series melds geometric shapes, clean lines, and squiggly forms into playful interpretations of foxes, roosters, and piranhas.

Varying from stark and abstract to more dense compositions, the minimal creatures are all rendered in the designer’s signature red and black color palette. Each piece has “an emphasis on balance and flow,” he tells Colossal, and the series is “a completely freeform exploration within a pretty strict, self-imposed design language. That contrast between total freedom and total restriction is what I think defines the messymod style. It’s what keeps it consistent and weird or… ‘consistently weird!'”

Prints of the collection are available in the messymod shop, and you can follow Adam G.’s personal and commercial projects on Behance and Instagram.

 

Photography

Underwater Photos by Steven Kovacs Frame the Shimmering Unearthly Bodies of Larval Fish

Set against the stark backdrops attainable only during blackwater dives, larval fish become strange, otherworldly specimens with glasslike bodies and translucent fins that billow outward. Their delicate, still-developing anatomies are the subjects of Steven Kovacs’s underwater photos, which frame the young creatures at such precarious stages of life.

Living in Palm Beach, Kovacs (previously) frequents the waters off the Florida coasts, although he’s also recently explored areas near Kona, Hawaii. Expeditions have brought encounters with both the elusive acanthonus armatu and a type of larval ipnopidae that hasn’t been documented previously. “Of course, we are always hoping to run across a never-before-seen species like the discoverichthys praecox,” he says. “To be the first to ever find and photograph a species in the wild is an absolute thrill.”

Next on Kovacs’s list are a hairy goosefish larva and a crocodile toothfish species. Dive into an extensive archive of his images on Instagram, and pick up a print from Blue Planet.