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)

A macaque crosses a pedestrian overpass in Hong Kong, China, 08 November 2021. According the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, AFCD, the total population of wild monkeys in Hong Kong is about 1,800, distributed in 30 social troops. (Photo by Jerome Favre/EPA/EFE)

Children play on a donkey cart belonging to an elderly Afghan refugee sleeping on a roadside on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, February 18, 2015. (Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photo)

A girl holds onto a pole as as she stands in floodwaters flowing from the swollen Bagmati River caused by heavy rainfall in Kathmandu, Nepal August 17, 2015. (Photo by Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters)

Groundhog Club co-handler Al Dereume holds Punxsutawney Phil, the weather prognosticating groundhog, in front of the crowd gathered for the 133rd celebration of Groundhog Day on Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pa. Saturday, February 2, 2019. Phil's handlers said that the groundhog has forecast an early spring. (Photo by Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo)

Tourists in traditional costumes visit a rose garden during a rose cultural festival on April 27, 2021 in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

A woman walks a dog with styled and dyed fur on a street in Shenyang, Liaoning province, China on December 25, 2018. (Photo by Reuters/China Stringer Network)

A performer gestures at the Harbin Ice-Snow World in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, December 25, 2021. The 23rd Harbin Ice-Snow World opened to the public on Saturday. (Photo by Xie Jianfei/Xinhua News Agency/Profimedia via AP Photo)