Some of the Best Marine Wildlife Pictures

Sea Changes: some of the world's best marine wildlife pictures go on show in Bristol

A new exhibition featuring some of the world’s best marine wildlife photographs is set to go on display in Bristol. The images, which will be showcased at Bristol’s Blue Reef Aquarium from Monday, feature everything from coral reefs and sea turtles to walruses, polar bears and orcas, and all have an environmental message

Multiple exposure of an Atlantic puffin returning to its nest site at the top of a cliff in Shetland, Scotland

All of the images for the Sea Changes exhibition have been provided by Bristol-based Specialist Stock, one of the country’s leading libraries for wildlife photography and film. After spending ten years working as a marine biologist Tom Walmsley, MD of Specialist Stock, decided to create a photo library which would offer a new perspective on the environment. "Hopefully the impact of these pictures will remind everybody who owns a camera of their responsibility to take pictures of subject matter they are inspired by and pass on a message about the subject, our relationship to it, and the changing environment," said Tom

A crying face is revealed in an ice cap located on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago in Norway

The exhibition will be officially launched on Monday with a private evening viewing as part of the Wildscreen Festival. It will then remain on display to visitors to the Blue Reef Aquarium until March next year. Blue Reef’s Mike Coe said: "We would like to thank Specialist Stock and fine art print house Latent Light for helping us to put on the exhibition. We hope it will provide visitors with a fascinating new insight in to the natural world and hopefully inspire a great understanding of wider environmental issues"

This Killer Whale, or Orca, narrowly misses out on a South American Sea Lion that it was hunting in Peninsula Valdes, Patagonia, Argentina

Among the images on show is an aerial photograph taken by Florian Schulz of thousands of Munk’s devil rays in the Sea of Cortez which recently won Environmental Photograph of the Year 

A hermit crab uses a broken top of a discarded glass drink bottle on the beach in Phuket, Thailand

A loggerhead sea turtle hatchling swims from the beach across the reef to the relative safety of open water in the Sargasso Sea

A short-billed spearfish is hooked on a line in open water off Big Island, Hawaii

A herd of walruses made up of a healthy mix of cows, calves and young bulls stake their claim to an ice floe in Chukchi Sea, high Arctic

A fisherman, free diving over a rocky reef, harvests sea snakes by hand in Gato Island, Philippines

A female humpback whale lies upside down, almost motionless, while a free diver swims above its belly in Rurutu, Austral Islands, in French Polynesia

Biologists in helicopters observing this polar bear have shot it with a dart to temporarily immobilise it for research purposes in Kaktovik, Alaska. Polar bear numbers have stopped declining but the pack ice they use to hunt is about to shrink or disappear. They are looking inland for food and regularly approach settlements in the Arctic

A green sea turtle hovering over a reef is cleaned by a school of fish in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. This is one of the images featured in the Sea Changes exhibition at Bristol's Blue Reef Aquarium from Monday, October 10

Schooling fish in a cage where divers monitor their fish stock which is being raised for human consumption in Ponza, Mediterranean Sea, Italy

This split level picture shows the clean sandy beaches and pristine coral reef in Rongelap Atoll, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, where two marine biologists are recording the ecosystem

A Hawaiian monk seal, an endangered species, caught in discarded fishing tackle in Kure Atoll, Pacific Ocean. Two seals were entangled at the time but both were successfully released

A humpback whale calf breaching towards the camera in off Chichagof Island, southeast Alaska