by | February 12, 2026
Carlton Ward Jr. Explores Florida’s Wilderness Coast
Photographer Carlton Ward Jr. navigates the Wilderness Coast and has a whale of a time with the largest shark in the world.
My favorite place on Earth is Florida’s Gulf Coast. I can list a lot of reasons why, but the biggest is that it’s home. Unseen, overlooked and forgotten. These three words describe the stories that have been the focus my career since 2005, when I began pointing my camera at Florida’s ranchlands. My work evolved to bears, panthers, the Florida Wildlife Corridor and many of the people and wildlife who share that landscape. Across two decades my focus has expanded, and these words have remained a mantra beneath my quest for people to see and remember the places, species and cultures we still have a chance to save.
I am drawn to the Wilderness Coast—two hundred miles of undeveloped shoreline along the Gulf between Tampa and Tallahassee—because it is where the two places I love most connect: the Florida Wildlife Corridor and the Gulf of Mexico. My purpose as a wildlife photographer is to showcase the connections between land and sea and inspire appreciation and protection of both. My favorite way to do that is sharing stories of wide-ranging wildlife and the movement of water from source to sea. I grew up in Clearwater, with one foot in the Gulf and one foot on my family’s corridor ranch near the Peace River. You could say that I’ve been trying to connect those two worlds ever since.
Clean water from more than a dozen rivers—like the Chassahowitzska, Homosassa, Withlacoochee and Suwannee, to name a few—is the main reason that the region supports the largest contiguous bed of seagrasses in the entire Gulf and provides a foundation for the marine ecosystem. And the water remains relatively clean because the headwaters and rivers flow from and through undeveloped land in the Florida Wildlife Corridor.
Large swaths of the coastline are protected as refuges and parks. But the breadth of protected land along this area of coast is often narrow, leaving the ecological health of the region vulnerable to future land use decisions further up the rivers. Today, most of the rivers flow through managed pine forests, which don’t require fertilization or irrigation, making them arguably the most compatible working landscape for the benefit of the entire watershed. The challenge is that other more intensive land uses, such as dairy farms and housing developments, can plummet water quality and cause expensive environmental crises, as Florida is experiencing in the Everglades and the Indian River Lagoon.
It is not just the textures and details of the river, but also knowing that it was once deeply polluted and seeing it now nearly restored.
—Carlton Ward Jr.
Now is our chance to achieve landscape-scale conservation of the interior wildlife habitats. The wild and connected nature of the region cannot be taken for granted. Economic stresses for the forestry industry and the rising value of real estate, paired with the thousand new residents who are moving to Florida every day, make the threat of wide-scale development more immediate that one might think.
Last July, I set out in Wildpath’s expedition houseboat, the Caladesi, to show the landscapes at stake. Underwater, I pointed my camera at the diversity of life thriving in the seagrasses. Above the surface, dodging afternoon thunderstorms, I flew my drone to portray the scale and beauty of the wild coastline. I documented several rivers, and this photograph of the Fenholloway River is one of my favorites. It is not just the textures and details of the river as it fans out into the Gulf, and layers of clouds lining an infinite horizon, but it’s also knowing that this river was once deeply polluted by the discharge from a paper mill before environmental regulations, and seeing now that the health of the river is nearly restored. Once-dead seagrasses near the mouth appeared to be thriving, showing the resilience of an ecosystem if we protect the quality of the water upstream.
The health of the water flowing from the land has a cascading influence through the estuaries, seagrasses and far beyond. Over the years, as I focused on the Florida panther to illustrate the geography and importance of the Florida Wildlife Corridor, my team at Wildpath and I also focused on the movements of wide-ranging animals in the Gulf to bring attention to the location and importance of marine wildlife corridors. That’s where the quest for the second photo began.
When researching Gulf migrations, I learned about a little-known population of whale sharks that scientist Eric Hoffmayer from NOAA discovered in the northern Gulf. Whale sharks, which are the largest fish in the ocean, reaching lengths over 40 ft, are well documented near Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where they make for a popular tourist attraction. But aggregations of as many as 100 feeding whale sharks in the mouth of the Mississippi River were surprising. For two consecutive summers, I went offshore of Louisiana with Eric and his team on a mission to locate and satellite-tag whale sharks to learn where they feed and migrate. Expectations were high, but after two weeks we did not find the sharks. The Gulf had reached record high temperatures and hurricanes had been active, though it is still not known why the groups of whale sharks Eric and team had documented in previous years seemed to have vanished.
Then the story took a different turn when large numbers of whale sharks started appearing closer to the Florida coast, starting near Destin and more recently near Tampa. During the past two years in May, boaters have reported seeing whale sharks within 20 miles of the mouth of Tampa Bay. Together with local anglers and the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, the NOAA team located and tagged whale sharks there. I joined the scientists in 2025, and they successfully located and placed spring-mounted, temporary satellite tags on the dorsal fins of thirteen whale sharks—which is what’s happening in this photo.
Whale sharks are fish with gills that could swim hundreds of miles along the ocean floor. But their favorite food is fish eggs, particularly those from little tunny or bonita, that float on the surface after spawning, often on the full moon. When feeding, whale sharks swim slowly with their mouths open scooping thousands of fish eggs with each gulp. That’s when the scientists can swim up and place the satellite tag.
If you are offshore and see a whale shark, and are confident in the water, you can swim next to one and observe it without touching it. A whale shark’s spots are like fingerprints, each pattern is unique. If you can capture photos of its spots, focusing on the gills near the pectoral fin, you can upload your photos via wildpath.com/whaleshark to a database that will help scientists identify the shark and where else it may have been seen. As scientists continue to map wildlife corridors for whale sharks and other marine species, the data will show the areas with the most conflict with shipping lanes and other industrial activity and where new marine protected areas are needed. The stories these animals tell should help inspire us to act to protect their pathways so that they can continue to make the planet habitable for us.
