Shortlisted: Pooyan Shadpoor, Houcheraghi. While walking along the shore of Larak, Iran – an island in the Persian Gulf – Shadpoor came across this luminous scene. The “magical lights of (the) plankton ... enchanted me so that I snapped the shot”, he writes. (Photo by Pooyan Shadpoor/2016 EPOTY)

Bloodthirsty by Thomas P. Peschak, Germany/South Africa — winner, Behaviour: birds. When rations run short on Wolf Island, in the remote northern Galápagos, the sharp-beaked ground finches become vampires. Their sitting targets are Nazca boobies and other large birds. The finches rely on a scant diet of seeds and insects, which regularly dries up, so they drink blood to survive. ‘I’ve seen more than half a dozen finches drinking from a single Nazca booby,’ says Tom. Rather than leave their nests the boobies tolerate the vampires, and the blood loss doesn’t seem to cause permanent harm. (Photo by Thomas P. Peschak/2018 Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

A woman spends her time outdoors to observe the ancient festival of Sizdeh Bedar, an annual public picnic day on the 13th day of the Iranian new year, at the Tochal mountainous area northern Tehran, Iran, Sunday, April, 2, 2017. Sizdeh Bedar, which comes from the Farsi words for “thirteen” and “day out”, is a legacy from Iran's pre-Islamic past that hard-liners in the Islamic Republic never managed to erase from calendars. (Photo by Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo)

Shoppers walk past crocodiles for sale at a market in Bata on February 3, 2015. Markets in Equatorial Guinea sell a variety of animals including pangolins, monkeys and crocodiles as food. (Photo by Carl de Souza/AFP Photo)

“Don't Leave Any Food On Your Plate”. The giraffes at Nairobi's Giraffe Manor are totally at home with humans. They will eat out of your hand, or even off your plate. Photo location: Giraffe Manor, Nairobi, Kenya. (Photo and caption by Gavin Werbeloff/National Geographic Photo Contest)

A greater bird of paradise (Paradisaea apoda) displaying in Badigaki Forest, Wokam Island (Aru Islands, Indonesia). Found here in Aru and on adjacent New Guinea, the greater bird of paradise represents about 40 different species of birds of paradise that depend on intact rainforest across the New Guinea region spanning eastern Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. With more than 80% of forest cover still intact, this region represents the largest remaining block of rainforest in the entire Asia-Pacific. (Photo by Tim Laman/naturepl.com/LDY Agency)

“For a bouquet of flowers”. Photographs made ​​in the last hours of the day. A goat is directed by a dangerous way to eat a small bouquet of flowers. Location: España, Barcelona, Montserrat. (Photo and caption by Renato Lopez Baldo/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

ATTENTION! All pictures are presented in high resolution. To see Hi-Res images – just TWICE click on any picture. In other words, click small picture – opens the BIG picture. Click BIG picture – opens VERY BIG picture.

This photograph taken on June 4, 2022 shows fish vendor Somporn Thathom sitting at her stall as a passenger train passes through the Mae Klong railway market in Samut Songkhram province, around 80 kms (50 miles) southwest of Bangkok. Six times a day at the market, local customers and foreign tourists scramble into nooks and crannies while vendors calmly move their woven baskets of goods away from the tracks and close their umbrellas. (Photo by Manan Vatsyayana/AFP Photo)