2025 photography competition
winners and runners up

To celebrate our fungal world, we invited you to capture your favourite fungus on camera! We received nearly 400 entries, many of which we will showcase over the coming months.

Fungi play vitally important roles in the natural environment and in our lives. Fungi are with us throughout history in folklore and mythology, playing important roles in ecosystems, and in modern use to benefit society. So we encouraged anyone to submit their best fungus photo, with prizes for the winners and runners up.

Up to 11 years old

Winner -

Aria Teale

Fungi is Fun

Runner up -

George Wallace

Churchyard Coral

Runner up -

Isla Blackwell

The moors inky one

12-17 years old

Winner -

Willow Bloomfield

Aliens

Our judges said: slime moulds are a fantastic and diverse group of organisms that have been baffling researchers and taxonomists for decades. Historic difficulties in classifying them means they have been squeezed and shunted from one Kingdom, Phylum or group to another and indeed, until relatively recently they were considered to be a part of the Kingdom Fungi. As a group they were last accepted as being part of the Kingdom Protista, but the group actually includes species that are only very distantly related to each other so they are further divided into the cellular slime moulds which are rarely visible to the human eye and the larger plasmodial 'true' slime moulds (or myxomycetes) which are the ones that can be encountered on many a woodland walk.