Photo & Story Package

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KINABATANGAN
A River Trip to Borneo's Hidden Jewel

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

The lowland riverine forest encompassing the extensive Kinabatangan river basin and its 26,000 hectares Wildlife Sanctuary has few rivals in the world for remoteness, richness of animal species and just sheer natural beauty. At the same time, this spectacular and mostly untouched wilderness of Malaysian Borneo is very accessible and easily explored – usually by small boat in daylight, and by foot at night or late evening. Departing from the harbour of nearby Sandakan – a pleasant coastal town aptly named “Gateway to... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

THE LEOPARDS OF TIMBAVATI

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

PRELUDE Timbavati Nature Reserve, 7.15 am - “They got him!”. Patrick’s wide grin and tense blue eyes reveal the thrill of it all – our tracker Albert has finally spotted the big male leopard we’ve been trying to locate in the dense bush of Timbavati Nature Reserve, South Africa, for the past two hours. Faintly hearing the rasping, coughing call of the big cat on the prowl at the first light of dawn, Patrick had snatched us from our luxurious breakfast to jump on the big green Land Rover, cameras and binoculars ready for the sighting of a lifetime. Fresh pugmarks in the wet sandy soil and bent tall grass were unmistakable tell-tale signs for the 50-year ol... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

DANUM
The Valley Where Time Stood Still

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

A Pristine, Virgin Primary Rainforest - The crown jewel of untouched nature of Borneo, the legendary Danum Valley Conservation Area is the largest protected lowland dipterocarp primary forest in Sabah, Malaysia. This pristine, untouched area of extraordinary beauty holds an unique status among other protected areas: before it became a conservation area there were no human settlements within the area, meaning that hunting, logging and other human interference was non-existent. This makes the area almost unique among... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

GHOST PIPEFISHES
Now You See Them, Now You Don’t

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

Little Masters of Camouflage - Divers are an obsessive breed: in fact, the diving community is periodically swept by fads, which take everybody by storm and which usually cause huge transcontinental migrations. Nowadays everybody is nuts about pygmy seahorses, and underwater photographers are quite willing to fly across the globe at the first feeble hint of what might possibly be a new species of this queer-looking and very small fish – but until a few years ago, it was its close relatives the Ornate Ghost pipefish... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

OCTOPUS
Stealthy Slinker of the Deep

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

Closely related to cuttlefish and belonging to the same class of Cephalopoda (meaning “Footed head” in Latin), octopi – or octopuses, both forms are correct – are some of the reef’s stealthiest and most cunning predators. Fired by an almost human intelligence and only slightly hindered in their evolutionary course (if compared to humans) by a less energy-efficient copper-based (rather than iron-based) blood, octopi silently slink and slither among the corals’ nooks and crannies, being able to disappear at lightning speed in impossibly tight crevices and sporting amazingly effective camouflage. Being boneless and... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

SCORPIONFISH
The Masters of Disguise

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

Look and Don't Touch - Now you see them, now you don’t – but, in fact, they’re everywhere. From shallow coral rubble flats to deep oceanic walls, from bare-looking muck bottoms to rich coral growth, there isn’t a single reef niche where you won’t be able to spot, sooner or later, a scorpionfish. If you look hard enough, of course, and above all if you don’t put your hand on one first: because these exquisitely colorful ambush predators are as cryptic (ie camouflaged) as they are venomous. Relying on finely ornamented somatolithic (ie shape-breaking) liveries to escape predation, they are also able to rapidly raise their syringe-like... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

BLISSFUL BALI
Island of the Gods

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

Any occurrence in Bali’s daily life is an excuse for an exercise in beauty. Beauty here is a way of life. An historically significant Hindu enclave in what is the world’s biggest Muslim nation – the archipelago of Indonesia - this relatively small island boasts unique, complex and highly textured art and culture, as layered as its world famous visual trademark, its ubiquitous terraced paddy fields. Temples, statues, cerimonies, even rites of burial are occasions to savour Bali’s highly complex, ornate display of pure beauty... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

NUDIBRANCHS

The Jewels of Poseidon

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

Despite their being extremely common in SE Asian and Pacific waters and most of the times being quite spectacularly shaped and colored, nudibranchs – or “nudis” in divers parlance – are still a mysterious lot to plenty of people. What the heck are those technicolored globs crawling in the muck? Have they got a head? Eyes, anyone? Where’s the front, and where the back? Do those things actually eat? Well, to put it simply, they’re slugs – or snails without an external shell. About forty Families in all, counting literally hundreds.... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

ANEMONEFISh
Adorable Clowns of the Sea

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

We all know and love clownfish, it’s a fact. Also known as anemonefish – a name which suits them rather better as we shall see – these small and colorful reef denizens belong to the very important and large Family of Pomacentridae , which numbers a grand total of more than 300 species and which they share with other very common, shallow-water fish such as damselfishes. Counting more than ten different species in SE Asian waters, clownfish are widely regarded as adorable if a little pesky camera subjects and easily.... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

LIONFISH
Masters of Elegance

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

Everybody loves Lionfish. Supremely elegant, draped in flowing, banner-like spectacular fins, these stealthly predators glide slowly among corals, always ready to swallow their prey in a lighting-fast gulp of their cavernous mouth. Belonging to the Family Scorpaenidae, these are small (5 cm) to medium-sized (30 cm) fish, closely related to the bottom-dwelling and much less mobile Scorpionfishes, with which they share the peculiar – and potentially dangerous – trait of sporting hypo needle-like fin rays (pectoral and dorsal).... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

RAJA AMPAT RELOADED

Text and photography by Andrea & Antonella Ferrari

Lying on my back, floating on the surface in a lazy, ever so slow current, I feel the warmth of the tropical sun on my face, the bright sunlight tingeing with an orange glow my closed eyelids. I flick them open at the startlingly raucous, loud cackle of a passing Eclectus parrot, just in time to glimpse a ludicrously bright flash of red and blue fly overhead, a splash of colors against the deep blue skies and the towering, silent clouds soaring far away. The water is warm and jade green, a few yellow floating dead leaves tickling my feet, here and there the glint of a reef fish below me. I lazily propel myself with a squid-like push of my hands towards... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

ADVENTURE MOZAMBIQUE
The Shark-bitten Mantas of Jangamo

Story and photography by Tim Rock

Whales and whale sharks. Mobulas and mantas. Bottlenose and humpback dolphins. Bull and great white sharks. They’re all here waiting for ya. The potential of the place really sinks in from atop a rolling, sandy hill near the Mozambique coast. Look inland. It takes but one evening of watching a sunset from high atop and ancient dune overlooking broad plains of trees and rolling hills with not a telephone or power pole in sight and only two track roads meandering off... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

THE BESTIARY BENEATH THE BAY

Life in the World's Highest Tides of the Bay of Fundy and Gulf of Maine

Text and photography by Scott Leslie

The ebb tide gets pinched into a powerful eight-knot current as it passes through the narrows of Grand Passage between Long and Brier Islands at the western tip of Nova Scotia. The current meets head on with the brisk wind, whipping the water into a froth of standing waves. Our lobster fishing boat pitches and rolls through the passage as we make our way to our dive site in the Bay of Fundy in the upper Gulf of Maine, home of the world’s highest tides... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

MYSTERIOUS PREDATORS OF THE FROZEN NORTH

Text and photography by Doug Perrine

It’s a staple of Hollywood, and the dramatic peak of many a film – that gut-wrenching, testicle-shrinking moment when the hunter realizes that he has just become the hunted. It happened in real life to Canadian diver Jeffrey Gallant when the tables turned in his multi-year quest to find an elusive giant predator in Canada’s saline rivers. When a massive dark shape passed right in front of him shortly after he landed on the bottom of the St. Lawrence Estuary in pea-soup conditions with visibility only extending an arm’s-length, Gallant understood immediately that his quarry had found him... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

ROMPING WITH THE UNICORNS OF THE SEA

Text and photography by Doug Perrine

As with all semi-mythic beasts, the lore of the sailfish consists of a bit of fact mixed with large portions of fantasy, conjecture, and hyperbole. Of its biology, relatively little is known. Is it one species, or two? Scientists are in disagreement. Some recognize both an Atlantic sailfish, Istiophorus albicans, and a Pacific variety, Istiophorus platypterus, while others consider all sailfish to belong to the latter species. Sailfish belong to the family Istiophoridae, or billfishes, which includes eleven species of marlin, spearfish, and sailfish (ten if you only count one species of sailfish)... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

SPITTING DOLPHINS OF THE MEKONG RIVER

Text and photography by Roland Seitre

Dry season drained all waters from the Mekong Basin. However, the great river, fed by the everlasting snows of the Tibetan highlands, still flows in an endless ribbon of silver reflection, but otherwise muddy waters. A thousand kilometres upstream from the Delta, the water surface shakes for an instant, before a large spatter breaks it. A small fish flew into the air. Just behind appears the real cause of all this disturbance : a greyish dolphin with a round head. Finally, I have found the rare Mekong river dolphin, a survivor, and even witnessed its strange, and poorly known, unique hunting technique... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Feeling a strange mixture of apprehension and glee, I watched a trio of black, triangular fins slice across the glassy surface, gradually closing on our position. We were floating in a chum slick, hundreds of feet off the bottom, enveloped by a frigid, planktonic soup that reduced visibility to less than 10 feet. Several sharks were nearly within touching distance, yet the murky conditions precluded seeing anything underwater, adding to our sense of unease. Trying to ignore the adrenalin surging through my system, I scanned the depthse... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

With strong trade winds blowing in some cold rain as I start my hike to the active lava flows of Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, I am reminded of how most of my adventures have begun for the last 16 years. My past experiences have taught me that I like to initiate my hikes around 9pm. Most people who were there for the sunset have gone home and many times I have the place to myself. The terrain at the lava flows is like no other place you will ever hike. Repeatedly you are going up and down 5-10 foot mounds of old razor sharp lava or making your way around them. Everything looks... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Finning as gently as possible, I slowly made my way across the muddy bottom, trying not to kick up clouds of silt. We were diving in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea—one of the richest marine environments I’ve encountered anywhere. I was just settling down to photograph a ghost pipefish when my wife Suzy swam over, gesturing emphatically for me to stop whatever I was doing and follow her. I really wasn’t inclined to leave such a photogenic subject, but experience has taught me not to ignore such messages... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Scuba diving, once considered a dangerous sport for adventurous explorers, is now viewed as a popular family activity, suitable for young children and the elderly, and certainly not the sort of edgy, extreme sport that young people like to watch on cable television. However, within the sport of diving are niche specialties that continue to push the envelope of acceptable risk. Over time, the boundaries of what constitute the extreme edges of diving have changed dramatically. Once, a dive below 100 m was considered insane. Now free-divers routinely pass that mark, and tech divers... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Up to our knees, and elbows, in intertidal mud we realise that it's tough work trying to be a dugong. For this is the realm in which they feed, spending most of their day uprooting and consuming seagrasses, and creating serpentine trails 20cm wide and up to several metres long in seagrass meadows. In contrast to our clumsy and messy efforts, dugongs are superbly equipped to do an efficient job – underwater. The dugong (Dugong dugon) looks rather like a cross between a rotund dolphin and a walrus. Its body, flippers and fluke resemble those of a dolphin but it has no dorsal fin. Its head... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

The coconut described a high lazy arc over the tropical reef, framing a small island on the barrier reef before plopping into theTF shallow cerulean water on the outside of the lagoon. A split-second after impact, a geyser of water and foam erupted from the ocean, as if a grenade had exploded. This was no ordinary coconut. It was loaded with cesium 137. Coconuts like this one had been responsible for completely de-populating Bikini Atoll. The evacuation of the Bikini Islanders in 1978 due to the hazards of ingesting radioactive coconuts was their second exodus from their traditional homeland. The first... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Parents of the current crop of tattooed, pierced, and branded teenagers may take scant comfort in the realization that assisted self-mutilation has been practiced in various human cultures for thousands of years. In fact the practice may have arisen well before the appearance of humans on the planet – perhaps even before our primordial ancestors crawled out of the ocean onto the shore. Consider the beaked whales. These mysterious creatures... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

It’s festival time in Malapascua, and the number of people crammed onto this 2x4 km dollop of sand just north of Cebu, in the central Philippines, is amazing. The return of natives working off-island, along with extended family, friends, and bon-vivants, has swelled the normal population of 3,000 or so to roughly double that. It seems that nearly everyone is crowded into a single street coursing the length of the small town of Logon, where a stage and bandstand have been set up for the evening’s entertainment. Beer in hand, Paul Foley is giving me an informal tour. We stop to pay respects at... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Even the victim was laughing, but Dr. Steve Oakley was not amused. He’d spent hours waiting for the perpetrator at its "love nest" that morning, then gone down to one of its nighttime hangouts to look for it in the afternoon. Sure enough, as soon as he left, the "Spratly Killer Wrasse" was back at the "bachelor pad," and everybody had seen it but him. Some of the divers got a little closer look than they were expecting. One of the guests, a gentleman from Scandinavia, described how the giant humphead wrasse had responded to the discharge of photo strobes by dashing forward and striking him... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Slowly the great fish turns, responding to the sound, which was imperceivable at first but now clearly audible. With long gracious sweeps of the crescent-shaped tail the huge spindle-like body moves effortlessly towards the source that has attracted it. From 20 metres below the surface the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) begins to angle itself upward toward the surface with ever-increasing thrusts of its huge tail. Now rapidly the source of the sound and vibration is becoming clearly visible, the shape and sound that 60 million years of evolution have taught it represents food and survival. The small... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Transmitted through the dense medium of seawater, the syncopated percussion is both deafening and terrifying, like a bombardment of artillery. It penetrates the body and seems to come from all directions at once. The noise is exactly the sound that I imagine would be produced by plucking a very taut metal bass guitar string as long and as thick as a telephone pole – the loudest, deepest twang you have ever heard. For the rapidly diminishing number of small silvery fish in front of me, it is the twang of death. The sound is generated by the impact of missiles striking the water at... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Parents of the current crop of tattooed, pierced, and branded teenagers may take scant comfort in the realization that assisted self-mutilation has been practiced in various human cultures for thousands of years. In fact the practice may have arisen well before the appearance of humans on the planet.

Consider the beaked whales. These mysterious creatures are... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

In these days of "stalkarazzi" and tabloid journalism, admitting to being a photojournalist is something akin to announcing that you have AIDS, but it’s a title that was once worn with pride. Journalists commanded respect, and adhered to a code of professional conduct. Some still do. One of the prime tenets of this code is "non-involvement." A journalist is supposed to report on an event, not participate in it. I’ve always tried to follow this rule, especially when it comes to dangerous activities, and particularly those involving the possibility of loss of major body parts. I include the handling of.. Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!

Fact or Fiction? Fiction is most likely the answer when it comes to this great animal, Carcharodon carcharias--the white shark. It is the most featured animal where descriptions don’t match the truth. No other animal has so tightly captured our fascination and imagination over decades like this super predator: a perfect model of speed, power and hunting skills. Because of its overwhelming features, white sharks... Contact us to read the complete story and publish it!