Here Had Been Some Way of Returning Them to the Deep Water of the Open Ocean, but It Was Not Possible.”

Eyecatchers Bat Cave Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) leaving maternity colony at night to feed, with red lighting at entrance to cave. Bracken Cave, San Antonio, Texas, USA, July. Bracken Cave is the world’s largest bat maternity colony. “As dusk deepens the sky outside Bracken Cave in Texas, a breath-taking spectacle takes place. For several hours, millions of bats stream out of the cave, tornadoing through the sky on one of their nightly hunting trips. Bracken Cave, outside San Antonio, is home to 15 to 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats, comprising the largest single colony of bats in the world. No other mammal on the planet lives at such a dense concentrations. Every night at dusk, between March and October, the bats emerge to feed - hunting moths, beetles and winged ants. They exit the cave in such dense clusters that they appear as storm clouds on weather radar! It was essential not to disturb the bats on their mass exodus from the cave, so I used infrared and other sophisticated lighting tech- niques to avoid disorienting them. It was such a beautiful thing to witness. Once the bats started coming out of the cave, they filled the sky. I could watch such a spectacle every night and never tire of it!” Photographer: Karine Aigner Image number: 1591021 & 1591035 Foster Mother Bishnoi lady breastfeeding an orphaned gazelle fawn, Indian gazelle or Chinkara (Gazella bennettii), the animals are released when they are old enough, Rajasthan, India. “The Bishnoi are a religious community that lives in Northwestern India. They treat wildlife as fellow creatures, not as a resource. In the same area lives the Indian gazelle, also known as chinkara. Some of them get killed by traffic or feral dogs. In such cases, the Bishnoi women traditionally breast-feed orphaned gazelle fawns - just like their own human children - before the animals are released back into the wild. The religious beliefs of the Bishnoi have a very real conservation value.” Photographer: Axel Gomille Image number: 1604001 & 1604003 Weaponised Slug Blue sea slug (Glaucus atlanticus) approaching the venom-filled tentacles of a Indo-Pacific Portuguese man-of-war (Physalia utriculus). Both were washed ashore as part of a mass, multi-day stranding of thousands of Portuguese man-of-war. South Africa. “A blue nudibranch (or sea slug) approaches the colourful, venom-filled tentacles of a bluebottle jellyfish, also known as a Portuguese man-of-war. The ocean-faring slug hunts and eats bluebottles, ingesting its prey’s powerful stinging cells (called nematocysts) and deploying them to special organs at the tips of its own cerata (the spiny outgrowths on its body). These confiscated weapons are then used for the slug’s own self- defence. In November 2017, strong offshore winds in False Bay, South Africa, resulted in a mass stranding of bluebottles – tens, if not hundreds of thousands were washed ashore over a four day period, along with the nudibranchs that associate with them. Every beach was filled with so many bluebottles that you could barely navigate without stepping on them. Most were dead, or damaged. I collected what living specimens I could find, and took them to my friend’s house near the beach. I set up a makeshift studio in his kitchen, using an assortment of improvised supplies. Among the items were chopsticks, BBQ skewers, mason jars, assorted Tupperware, USB lights, hazard lights for accident scenes, cutting boards, printer paper, newspapers, and a very attentive Swiss Shepherd who kept me company (as all other humans had abandoned me by this point). Afterwards, I passed all the animals I’d collected to the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town. I wish there had been some way of returning them to the deep water of the open ocean, but it was not possible.” Photographer: Tony Wu Image number: 1592331 Night Patrol Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) at night, Zimanga private game reserve, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, September 2018. “Photographing wild Nile crocodiles silently patrolling the water in the dead of night isn’t something that’s been done much before, so when special night lights were recently added to a photographic hide regularly visited by these three metre-long prehistoric predators, the possibility of capturing them was too good to miss. All that separated us from these dangerous reptiles, circling just inches away from our lenses, was a slim panel of specially designed one-way glass. The crocodiles, residents of a nearby dam on the Zimanga game reserve, South Africa, had been tempted into the specially-lit lagoon with a few scraps of meat. As wildlife photographers, the darkness completely changed the way we experienced photographing such thrilling creatures. With no distracting background, our subjects became exaggerated versions of themselves; their size and defining characteristics appeared larger and more menacing and their gnarly outlines, illuminated by the lights and glinting like gold, completely mesmerised us.” Photographer: Ann & Steve Toon Image number: 1607367 Electric Flight Despite having no wings, spiders are capable of travelling hundreds of miles through the air, using a technique called balloon- ing. They do this by climbing up to an exposed point, standing ‘on tiptoes’, and releasing multiple threads of silk, which carry them aloft. For many years, prevailing scientific opinion was that air currents alone were sufficient to transport these intrepid arachnids on their flights, during which they can sometimes be carried four kilome- tres (roughly three miles) above the Earth’s surface. So how do spiders and their silk balloons float through the air when there’s no wind? The answer is electrifying – literally. Researchers at the University of Bristol, have discovered that spiders can become airborne using atmospheric electricity, oth- erwise known as the atmospheric potential gradient (APG). When they exposed Linyphiid spiders to artificial electric fields that were equivalent to those found in the atmosphere, the spiders flew. When the electric field was switched off, the tiny arachnids would glide down again. The researchers believe that the spiders detect electric fields using sensory hairs – called trichobothria – on their legs, the same way that human hair pricks up in response to a statically-charged balloon. Photographer: Michael Hutchinson Image number: 1599120 & 1599132 Tummy Rub Snorkeller rubbing the belly of a baby Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris). Three Sisters Spring, Crystal River, Florida, USA. “It’s an itchy life for a manatee, and the ones living in Florida’s Crystal River have learned that getting a stroke or a scratch from a person is far more effective than rubbing against a rotten log! The youngsters - like this one - are often highly social and once they’ve discovered the benefits of a good scratcher, they’ll come back again and again. They demonstrate a clear ability to recognise individual people in the water. The snorkelers, for their part, are directed to only touch manatees with one hand - this way it’s impossible to grab hold of the rotund mammals and therefore the interaction remains solely on the manatee’s terms. Manatees live in the ocean and close to freshwater springs across Florida, but it’s only in Crystal River where snorkelers are allowed to swim with these protected animals.” Photographer: Alex Mustard Image number: 1598557 Survivor Brush footed butterfly (Lycorea sp.) caterpillar with parasitic wasp cocoons on silk threads, Yasuni National Park, Orellana, Ecuador. “Monkeys, birds, frogs, snakes, butterflies… I never know where to point my camera in the Amazon. There’s something interesting in every glance. But when I saw this caterpillar, I knew I’d found something incredibly unusual. The caterpillar had been parasitised by an ichneumon wasp. These wasps choose a host (usually the larvae of butterflies or beetles) to lay their eggs in. The eggs are inserted using a long, sharp append- age called an ovipositor that can pierce the flesh of the victim. When the eggs hatch, the wasp larvae begin to develop inside their living host, feeding on its tissues until they’re ready to pupate. By then, the host is usually dead, or nearly so. But that was not the case here. The caterpillar was still alive, even though the many wasp larvae had eaten their way out of it and were pupating in their silken cocoons. I’d always wanted to photograph this disturbing interaction but it´s not easy to find… let alone in a host that can survive such a gruesome attack!” Photographer: Lucas Bustamante Image number: 1592542 Safety in Numbers European barracuda (Sphyraena sphyraena) and bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix) circling baitball of Atlantic horse mackerel (Trachurus trachurus) Formigas Islets, Azores. In the open ocean, small fish are vulnerable. There are no hiding places, such as kelp forests, or the cracks and crevices of coral reefs and coastal rocks. Instead, some fish species - such as these Atlantic horse mackerel besieged by predatory barracuda and bluefish - form a bait ball. The mackerel pack tightly together to form a dense sphere that ex- poses the least number of individual fish, and protects the majority on the inside of the ball. None of the fish inside the bait ball are aware of how the school has configured itself. Rather, it forms as the result of relatively simple rules followed by each individual, such as remaining close together, moving in the same direction, and avoiding collisions with each other. Photographer: Franco Banfi Image number: 1579697 All Aboard! Curious Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) investigating boat, Spitsber- gen, Svalbard, Norway, Arctic Ocean. “This polar bear was photographed on an ice floe in Svalbard, Nor- way. It was feasting on a dead walrus, but when it saw our boat it took an interest and approached us.

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