A) 1st place WINNER – Roy Rimmer. “This rat was in an outdoor set I made, the set up is two meters long and a meter wide made of Perspex,it has a plywood front with holes cut in for my camera and flash guns, I placed two rusty paint cans in the set up and the rat would leap from one can too the other, I had to use flash to freeze the action”.

16-year-old panda, Ye Ye, rests in an enclosure at the Wolong Nature Reserve, a conservation center that trains pandas for release into the wild. This image was published in the August 2016 National Geographic magazine as part of the “Pandas Gone Wild” story. (Photo by Ami Vitale/National Geographic Creative)

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)

Japanese macaques, also known as snow monkeys, play as they soak in a hot spring in Jigokudani valley in Nagano Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo Saturday, March 6, 2021. (Photo by Kiichiro Sato/AP Photo)

A great tit eats food from the top of a photographer's hat as the press wait for politicians on Downing Street on December 16, 2019 in London, England. The UK's Prime Minister is set to hold a mini Cabinet reshuffle to replace outgoing ministers following last week's general election victory. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

People cling on to a crowded train as it leaves a railway station during the ongoing Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Ghaziabad, India, September 21, 2021. (Photo by Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters)

A baby orangutan called Barney shows off his dancing at Ragunan Zoo in Jakarta, Indonesia in the first decade of November 2023. (Photo by Syahrul Ramadan/Media Drum Images)

Camels graze in front of a spacecraft tracking station ahead of the Soyuz MS-10 upcoming launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, October 9, 2018. (Photo by Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters)