Billions of newly hatched locusts are spreading throughout Israel's South. The young locusts identified in the Negev Desert area are the offspring of locust swarms that entered Israel from Egypt in March. (Photo by Eliahu Hershkovitz/Haaretz)

“Entwined Lives”. Tim Laman, US Winner, Wildlife photographer of the year. A young male orangutan makes the 30-metre climb up the thickest root of the strangler fig high above the canopy in Gunung Palung national park, one of the few protected orangutan strongholds in Indonesian Borneo. Laman had to do three days of climbing to position several GoPro cameras that he could trigger remotely. This shot was the one he had long visualised, looking down on the orangutan within its forest home. (Photo by Tim Laman/2016 Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

Pictured is the sunset at Stonehenge in Wiltshire on Saturday night, September 24, 2022. (Photo by Nick Bull/pictureexclusive.com)

A pigeon rests on a wild iguana in a tree inside Seminario Park in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Thursday, April 3, 2014. Pigeons coexist with the wild iguanas at this park in the middle of the city surrounded by savannah. (Photo by Dolores Ochoa/AP Photo)

An Indian white tiger cools off in a pond in its enclosure at Chhat Bir Zoo on the outskirts of Chandigarh on May 22, 2016. Temperatures have soared to a scorching 51 degrees Celsius in one Indian city, meteorologists said, with the ferocious heat setting a new national record. Northern Phalodi wilted as the mercury reached a new high on May 20, equivalent to 123.8 Fahrenheit, beating a 60-year-old record. (Photo by Shammi Mehra/AFP Photo)

A woman carries a water pump to work on February 11, 2017 in Almolonga, Guatemala. The Mayan town in the western highlands district of Quetzaltenango has surged in prosperity in recent years with high-productivity vegetable farming, exporting much of its excess crops to neighborning El Salvador. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Beautiful, strange and occasionally alarming pictures from the shortlist for this year’s Wellcome image awards – which celebrate the very best in science photography and imaging – from an x-ray of a bat to a micrograph of a kidney stone. The exhibition opens on 12 March at three science centres and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Photo: Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of an Arabidopsis thaliana flower, also commonly known as thale cress. Some of the anthers are open, revealing pollen grains ready for dispersal. Arabidopsis was the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced and is widely used as a model organism in molecular and plant biology. Horizontal width of image is 1200 microns. Magnification 100x. (Photo by Stefan Eberhard/Wellcome Images)

Behaviour: Mammals category. Giant Gathering by Tony Wu, USA. Dozens of sperm whales mingled noisily off Sri Lanka’s northeast coast, stacked as far down as Tony could see. This was a congregation of dozens of social units, like a gathering of the clans. Aggregations like this could be a critical part of the whales’ rich social lives but are rarely reported. Some two thirds of the population was wiped out before commercial whaling was banned in 1986. This kind of major gathering could be “a sign that populations are recovering”, says Tony. (Photo by Tony Wu/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017)