Venomous Sea Snakes Surround Photographer in Amazing Serpent 'Siesta' Photo

An incredible image showing a photographer's point of view as he was surrounded by venomous sea snakes is among the pictures chosen for the 58th Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.

The exhibition, which opened Friday at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM), will tour across the United Kingdom before heading to venues across the world, including Texas Tech University and the Detroit Zoological Society in the United States.

The exhibition includes 100 photographs that were selected from more than 38,000 entries across 93 countries. It includes the winning images and additional photographs that were "Highly Commended" by the judges. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the NHM.

Among the "Highly Commended" images in the "Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles" category is one photograph called "the Snake Tree" that was captured by German photographer Juergen Freund in Vaturova, Vanua Levu, Fiji—an island nation in the South Pacific.

Freund snapped the photograph while on assignment for WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) South Pacific to document Fiji's Great Sea Reef—the third-largest barrier reef in the world.

The image shows dozens of banded sea kraits—a type of venomous snake—hanging out at a lone mangrove tree in the sea.

"I had been working with sea kraits and sea snakes for many years and particularly love banded sea kraits," Freund told Newsweek.

The day that the photographer took the picture, he had been on a boat going from island to island photographing traditional Fijian life, culture, wildlife and fishing.

After a whole morning diving in a marine protected area of the Great Sea Reef, Freund was on his way back to land when his local dive guide said in passing, "Oh, there's a sole mangrove tree in the middle of the sea not far from the island that, at low tide, has sea kraits resting on the mangrove tree roots."

Intrigued, Freund asked if they could head to the tree, given that, at that point, it was low tide.

"Our boat driver had a discussion first as they were hungry and never liked going near the snakes," he said. "But we were able to see this amazing congregation of sea snakes swimming in from all around the lone mangrove, slithering up the tree for some sort of siesta while the tide was low."

Freund said in statement to the NHM that the snakes were "swimming all over him" to get to their favorite hangout spot.

The photographer captured the image using a Nikon D800e camera equipped with a 16mm fish-eye lens inside a Seacam housing for underwater protection.

"The conditions were perfect as I could stand on the sandy bottom with the water just chest deep and could shoot my split level images with not much difficulty as the water was calm and my subjects were all around me," he said.

Natalie Cooper, principal researcher at the NHM and judge for the photography competition, told Newsweek images like this which are split across water and air are hard to get right.

"But this image beautifully captures the sea krait under water and the congregation of snakes above the water in the tree," Cooper said. "Such a gorgeous animal and fascinating behavior combined in one shot make this a perfect image."

Sea kraits are among the most venomous animals in the tropical Indo-Pacific, but they are not aggressive and bites on humans are very rare.

"I have worked on sea krait stories for many years as a photojournalist and I am quite aware how they behave," Freund said. "They have short teeth and are rather lazy to bite if not threatened under normal circumstances. But there is certainly always a chance of an accidental bite."

"I was wearing a neoprene dive suit that gave me some protection. But I was not too worried that I was in any sort of danger. Our Fijian friends on the other hand were a little far away safely on their open boat afraid that we were so near the snakes."

Among the other "Highly Commended" images in the competition is "Sloth Dilemma" captured by American photographer Suzi Eszterhas in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Costa Rica. The image captures a tense encounter between a brown-throated sloth and a large dog.

When Eszterhas took the image, the sloth had just made it across the road. But to reach the next clump of trees it had to return to the ground and crawl. At this point, it froze after spotting a big dog. This was a potentially deadly situation for the sloth—dog attacks are the second leading cause of sloth deaths in Costa Rica.

One of the competition's winning images, which came top of the "Photojournalism" category, is "Ndakasi's Passing." This photo was captured by South African photographer Brent Stirton in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The image shows the last moments of an orphaned mountain gorilla called Ndakasi, who was rescued by Virunga park rangers at the age of just 2 months old after her troop was massacred by a charcoal mafia, a criminal group involved in the illegal charcoal trade, in 2007. In the photo, the gorilla is dying in the arms of Andre Bauma, the ranger who has looked after her for 13 years.