The film deals with the illegal wildlife trade, including the filmmakers exposing a whale meat restaurant in the US (on the same day Louie Psihoyos was originally planning to collect his Academy Award for The Cove) and covert undercover investigations of the shark fin and Manta ray gill trade in Hong Kong and mainland China for traditional medicines.

The film also documents successful efforts to include manta rays on the CITES Appendix II list of protected species, thus stopping the village of Lamakera on Solor in Indonesia from killing them to supply demand in China.

More specific examples include the imminent extinction of the Florida grasshopper sparrow and Rabb's fringe-limbed treefrog (the last individual of which, Toughie, and Joel Sartore photographs).

Ocean acidification and the subsequent degradation of corals and other calcium carbonate-based marine organisms are revealed with lab experiments and comparisons of archived photographs to the state of the same reefs in the 2010s.

As well as the greenhouse gas camera previously mentioned and the projector, it is also the first car in the world with electro-luminescent paint, inspired by bioluminescent organisms, and projects endangered animal sounds from the Bioacoustics Research Program.

Other nominees competing in this category were "Earned It" from Fifty Shades of Grey, "Til It Happens to You" from The Hunting Ground, "Simple Song #3" from Youth, and "Writing's on the Wall" from Spectre.