{"id":306719,"date":"2025-10-16T00:45:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T00:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/306719\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T00:45:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T00:45:18","slug":"survival-purse-wildlife-photographer-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/306719\/","title":{"rendered":"Survival Purse | Wildlife Photographer of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ralph Pace&#8217;s Image<\/p>\n<p>Ralph Pace (USA) beautifully illuminates the egg case of a swell shark, tethered to the base of a giant kelp.<\/p>\n<p>Faced with strong currents pushing him from side to side, Ralph struggled to keep steady to photograph this egg case, or \u2018mermaid\u2019s purse\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>He lit the case from behind to reveal the swell shark embryo within. Its gill slits and yolk sac are clearly visible among the dark kelp forest.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers estimate that kelp forests in Monterey Bay have declined by more than 95% over the past 34 years.<\/p>\n<p>This makes swell sharks vulnerable because they depend on kelp to lay their leathery eggs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ralph Pace&#8217;s Image Ralph Pace (USA) beautifully illuminates the egg case of a swell shark, tethered to the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":306720,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[17500,159,67,132,68,837,80059,154531,154529,154530,154528],"class_list":{"0":"post-306719","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-nature-photography","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-wildlife","14":"tag-wildlife-competition","15":"tag-wildlife-images","16":"tag-wildlife-photographer-of-the-year","17":"tag-wildphoto","18":"tag-wpy-exhibition"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115381084131120644","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}