People search for shells on a beach in Sittwe, Rakhine State, Myanmar, 17 September 2020. International Coastal Cleanup Day is observed annually on the third Saturday of September and will occur on 19 September this year. (Photo by Nyunt Win/EPA/EFE/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

The National Geographic Photo Ark is a travelling exhibition of photographer Joel Sartore’s quest to create a photo archive of biodiversity around the world. So far, Sartore has captured studio portraits of more than 6,000 species – a number that he hopes to double. On 1 July, the ark will open at Melbourne zoo – the first time it has been exhibited in the southern hemisphere. More than 50 portraits will be on display, including many of Australian endangered animals being protected by programs at the zoo itself. These captions have been edited from text supplied by Melbourne zoo. Here: Barking owl. (Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark/The Guardian)

Gray whale feeding at the surface and showing it's baleen. (Photo by Christopher Swann/Biosphoto)

A kid wearing rollerblades hitches a ride via motorbike, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sunday, October 25, 2015. The country held the first-round presidential vote Sunday. Haitians chose between 54 presidential hopefuls and a slew of legislative and municipal candidates. (Photo by Ricardo Arduengo/AP Photo)

Workers from the South Florida Science Center and Aquarium and Imagine Exhibitions put together an animatronic spinosaurus outside the science center in West Palm Beach, Fla., Tuesday, October 27, 2015. The giant spinosaurus is part of the Dinosaurs Around the World exhibit, set to open on November 1. (Photo by Maria Lorenzino/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP Photo)

Dancers perform during the carnival in Encarnacion, Paraguay on February 26, 2017. Encarnacion is located 375 km south of Asuncion, describes itself as the “Carnival Capital of Paraguay”. (Photo by Norberto Duarte/AFP Photo)

A family member of the Toraja ethnic group prepares the bodies of exhumed relatives from a community burial site to be cleaned and dressed in a series of traditional ceremonies honouring the dead known as Manene at Torea village, in North Toraja, Indonesia's South Sulawesi on August 17, 2022. (Photo by Andri Saputra/AFP Photo)

A traffic police officer directs traffic in Mohe City, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, December 29, 2019. Temperatures in Mohe, “north pole” of China, often stand at below minus 40 degrees Celsius in winter mornings. Photo by Yang Siqi/Xinhua News Agency/Alamy Live News)