A pro-independence protester sits in front of Catalonia's regional parliament as lawmakers vote inside, in Barcelona, January 16, 2014. (Photo by Albert Gea/Reuters)

“After an afternoon of hiking and exploring the caves of Rhossili Bay, West Glamorgan, we caught the sun breaking through the clouds”. (Photo by Megan Warren-Davis/The Guardian)

In this photo taken Wednesday, December 5, 2018, a woman who scavenges recyclable materials from garbage for a living is seen through a cloud of smoke from burning trash, surrounded by Marabou storks who feed on the garbage, at the dump in the Dandora slum of Nairobi, Kenya. As the world meets again to tackle the growing threat of climate change, how the continent tackles the growing solid waste produced by its more than 1.2 billion residents, many of them eager consumers in growing economies, is a major question in the fight against climate change. (Photo by Ben Curtis/AP Photo)

Commended. In late May, about a quarter of a million snow geese arrive from North America to nest on Wrangel Island, in northeastern Russia. They form the world's largest breeding colony of snow geese. Photographer Sergey Gorshkov spent two months on the remote island photographing the unfolding dramas. Arctic foxes take advantage of the abundance of eggs, caching surplus eggs for leaner times. But a goose (here the gander) is easily a match for a fox, which must rely on speed and guile to steal eggs. “The battles were fairly equal”, notes Sergey, “and I only saw a fox succeed in grabbing an egg on a couple of occasions, despite many attempts”. Surprisingly, “the geese lacked any sense of community spirit”, he adds, “and never reacted when a fox harassed a neighboring pair nesting close by”. (Photo by Sergey Gorshkov/Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer)

A woman takes a dip in a font on the eve of the Orthodox Epiphany in central Moscow, Russia, January 18, 2016. Orthodox believers mark Epiphany on January 19 by immersing themselves in icy waters regardless of the weather. (Photo by Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)

A fledgling solar system containing deep within it enough water vapor to fill all the oceans on Earth five times, located in our Milky Way galaxy about 1,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. (Photo by Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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)

A woman smokes marijuana during a Global March for Marijuana in Medellin, Colombia, May 5, 2018. The annual Global Marijuana March is taking place in over 100 cities across the world in an effort to raise awareness of the benefits of medical cannabis and to call for the legalization of marijuana. (Photo by Fredy Builes/Reuters)