Photographer Joost van Uffelen and Sandy van de Water were in the Sea of Cortez near Isla Espirito Santo shooting photographs of dolphins all day when they spotted this incredible school of mobula stingrays on their annual migration. After seeing a handful of the mobulas breach the surface and jump into the air, the two photographers dove into the water to investigate further and found a school of over 400 mobula rays swimming together.
Now I’m not sure if I’m tripping balls or not, because I didn’t prepare my own lunch today and instead had it delivered from Seamless, but assuming I’m not tripping out then this is truly stunning footage.
Joost van Uffelen is a Dutch photographer who holds and MBA, and between school and work has spent his time traveling around the world capturing stunning photographs, and has overtime developed quite a passion for underwater photography (even winning NatGeo awards), and thankfully so. Because without that extensive travel we’d probably have never seen such amazing footage of the mobula rays migrating.
Joost blogged extensively about his trip to the Sea of Cortez, a trip whose main focus was to capture footage of the migrating (and jumping) mobulas, as well as swim with the California Sea Lions, and capture pictures of dolphins and whales. Joost van Uffelen and his partner Sandy van de Water STRUCK GOLD when they spotted some mobulas jumping out of the water and decided to investigate further. And in addition to the footage above (video), he released images on his website as well as to Caters TV News (link down below). You saw the stunning video footage above of the mobula rays, but here’s some quick highlights in GIF:
For a complete recap of Joost van Uffelen’s trip to Mexico and stunning encounter with the mobula rays you can CLICK HERE TO HIS BLOG, or check out some more pics over on Caters News.