Record number of early votes cast in Georgia. Tom Brady becomes part owner of Raiders. Why America’s drug stores are closing.
Brandon Güell documents a rare breeding frenzy of tree frogs in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. These spectacular mass-breeding events occur in only a few remote locations, a few times a year. Each female lays around 200 eggs and eventually the hatched tadpoles drop into the water below.Tiina Törmänen met a school of European perch on her annual lake snorkel in Finland. She framed the orange-finned fish flying through clouds of algae. Although beautiful, excessive algal growth is a result of climate change and warming waters and can cause problems for aquatic wildlife.US photographer Suzi Eszterhas captures an encounter between a brown-throated sloth and a dog in Costa Rica. Having taken part in a sloth-safety training program, the dog simply sniffed it. Sloths live in trees and rarely descend but have been forced into urban areas by habitat loss.Srikanth Mannepuri takes a sobering look at the scale of unsustainable fishing in Andhra Pradesh, India. Mannepuri was shocked to see so many recently caught marlin and sailfish at a fish market in one morning. He used a drone to take the image from a bird’s-eye view. Sailfish and marlin are top ocean predators essential to ecosystems.Samuel Sloss was highly commended in the 15 to 17-year-old category for his image of a coconut octopus peeking out from a clam shell. He shot the image while muck diving in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The octopus shut the lid of the shell when Samuel approached, but then slowly opened it, revealing colors and coils.Richard Robinson’s main challenge was to swim far enough from the curious whale calf to photograph it. Now protected, New Zealand’s southern right whales, known as ‘tohorā’ in Māori, were hunted to near extinction by European whalers in the 1800s, then by Soviet whalers in the 1900s.Morgan Heim reveals an intimate encounter between a beetle and a rabbit in Washington state’s Columbia Basin. Heim set up camera traps by the burrows of pygmy rabbits to observe them. She was delighted as one of the rabbits sniffed at a stink beetle that had been sheltering in its burrow.Joshua Cox frames a red deer stag standing majestically as the snow falls. It had just started to snow when Joshua, 7, and his father arrived in Richmond Park in London, England. They followed the deer at a safe distance when suddenly the snow intensified and one of the stags stopped.Jose Fragozo from Portugal captures the contrast between the natural world and human infrastructure. Dwarfed by the giant pillars of Kenya’s new Standard Gauge Railway running through Nairobi National Park, the gray blocks contrast with the unmistakable pattern of nature’s tallest land mammal.Canadian Jo-Anne McArthur shows American mink kits fighting for space in a small cage on a Swedish fur farm. The sign above indicates two have died. Due to legislation changes since this photo was taken, farms now have slightly larger cages, but the standard of life remains poor.Jasper Doest shot a portrait of Lubinda Lubinda — station manager for the Zambezi River Authority — revealing the impact of drought on the flood plain. Wildlife is dependent on regular floods, as are the Barotse people. Lower water levels mean Lubinda’s new house (right) did not need to be so high.After years of visiting the Finnish river, Heikki Nikki knew every ‘dipping’ rock favored by white-throated dippers. Picking one hidden beneath flowing water, he sat quietly on the bank. Suddenly the spot became the subject of a hotly contested argument.Dmitry Kokh used a low-noise drone to capture this image of a polar bear on the small island of Kolyuchin, in the Russian High Arctic. With climate change reducing sea ice, hunting is becoming increasingly difficult, pushing these bears to scavenge.
