In 2014, there was a widely held perception that The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize had run out of steam. The decision was taken to suspend the award for a year, conduct a review and then relaunch it in 2016.

The review was held and the main changes were to beef up the panel of judges, simplify the prize structure and make it non-acquisitive with an Open Prize Award of $30,000, an Emerging Artist Award of $10,000 and People's Choice and Scientists' Choice awards, each of $5000. In short: the prize purse has been halved; photography, inexplicably, is still excluded; and the popular categories of painting, works on paper and three-dimensional work, which formerly attracted a prize of $12,000 each, have been scrapped.

Sadly, artists have voted with their feet and this is the most woeful Waterhouse exhibition since the prize was initiated in 2002. The winning entry is a bit of a damp squib made by a New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based jeweller and taxidermist, Julia deVille. The piece is titled Neapolitan Bonbonaparte and consists of an antique sterling silver ladle in which sit three taxidermied chicks whose feathers have been dyed strawberry, chocolate and vanilla, the colours of Neapolitan ice cream. The message is that people who buy free-range eggs often do not realise that cage eggs are frequently used in the manufacture of ice cream, mayonnaise, cakes and breads and there is no compulsion on manufacturers to disclose this.

DeVille has been making a name for herself on the Biennale art circuit with her finely crafted taxidermied animals and gothic sensibility and she participated in the Museum of Contemporary Art's Primavera show in 2007, Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2013 and at MONA in Hobart. Her piece in the Waterhouse exhibition lacks the scale necessary to hold the attention of the viewer, whereas her Custard installation at the National Gallery of Victoria, with 50 chicks and an ice cream scoop, makes a similar ideological point, but does this much more effectively.

The Emerging Artist Award has gone to Canberra's Dan Power, a draughtsman and street artist with a dark predisposition, who likes to draw with pen and ink on paper and, more recently, on skulls. His piece in the Waterhouse is titled G[razed] and consists of an incredibly intricate pen and ink drawing on a bull's skull that appears like a northern gothic mystical forest scene, but now populated with Australian flora and fauna. A closer inspection reveals the presence of the hairy-nosed wombat, the night parrot, the Leadbeater's possum and other endangered species. The idea of endangered animals drawn on the skull of an animal that has destroyed the natural ecosystem through overgrazing is fairly obvious, but nonetheless effective.

To speak of highlights in such a disappointing show is a little optimistic, but the pieces that have been included in the Canberra selection of 25 items that are better than most are by Jenni Kemarre Martiniello, Barbie Kjar, Diane Allison, Nick Mount and Simon Hogan.

If the media release is to be trusted, this year there were 627 entries, exactly the same number as in 2014, but the quality is clearly lower. With only half the prize purse and the event changed from annual to a biennial, there are ominous signs that the Waterhouse may be an art prize that is facing extinction.