Kona resident’s photo of marine creature wins national contest out of 29,000 entries

Any time 75-year-old Bo Pardau heads out to do a blackwater dive in deep water off the shore of Kona, he hopes he’ll see something extraordinary.

On March 14, he did. Through his mask, he saw a 2-inch long cystisoma amphipod.

Using his Canon 7D Mark II camera with a 60-millimeter macro lens, Pardau of Kona captured the intricate detail of the amphipod’s body with big strobe lights attached to the underwater housing.

Pardau’s image of the deep-water crustacean won the grand prize in the National Wildlife Federation’s 53rd annual photo contest, in which 3,200 photographers submitted 29,000 images.

Editorial director of National Wildlife magazine Jennifer Wehunt said Pardau’s photo has so much personality and somehow felt familiar “for a creature most of us will never see in the wild.”

Wehunt added: “We try to avoid personifying wildlife, but it’s hard to look at this photo and not think, ‘jaunty!'”

In the magazine, Wehunt wrote that so much of photography is about waiting for the right moment: a subtle shift in lighting, a gentle breeze, a serendipitous encounter.

“When those stars align, boom! The result is like a flashbulb,” Wehunt wrote. “The photographer feels it, and so do we as viewers, even months or years later. It’s an instant jolt with longevity, a precise second that transcends time.”

On the night he took the photo, Pardau had gone out with friends on a private boat to look at the animals coming from depths of 4,000 feet to feed at the surface about three miles off the Kona coastline.

“We look for any larval animal or critter coming up from the deep,” Pardau said. “Conditions that night were quite good. It was a clear night with little chop on the water.”

All of sudden, Pardau remembers seeing one of the other divers looking at the most “fascinating thing” he’d ever seen: a cystisoma amphipod.

Pardau described the crustacean as looking like it was walking and lurking. He knew that the 2-inch-wide transparent creature with multi-eyes like flies would make a fascinating image.

It was the largest thing he has seen out in the blackwater. Most creatures are much smaller.

Pardau won $5,000 as the grand prize winner. He says it will go toward a diving trip to the Philippines.

With categories ranging from baby animals to birds to landscapes to people in nature. Photographers could enter multiple photos and multiple categories.

Click here to view all the winners.

National Wildlife magazine’s 54th annual photo contest is open for submissions from Jan. 15 through March 23, 2025. According to the National Wildlife Federation website, all entries support the conservation mission of the organization, ensuring wildlife and people thrive in a rapidly changing world.