Wakodahatchee wetlands, Delray Beach, Florida, US. Equipped with sinewy necks and spear-like bills, great blue herons can lunge with fearsome speed to strike their aquatic prey. Adults will also employ rapid stabbing motions as one aspect of their complex courtship displays; they’re seemingly dangerous moves, but fitting to the intensity of mating season. (Photo by Melissa Rowell/Audubon Photography Awards)

Igor Armicach, a doctoral student at Hebrew University's Arachnid Collection, looks onto giant spider webs, spun by long-jawed spiders (Tetragnatha), covering sections of the vegetation along the Soreq creek bank, near Jerusalem, Israel on November 7, 2017. (Photo by Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

From Britain to China to Mali, new maps showing travel times to the nearest urban centre reveal huge differences between countries. Using Open Street Map and Google, a University of Oxford team have created a visual breakdown that suggests major inequalities when it comes to commuting. Here: China. The dataset used for China was unique as it relied solely on Open Street Map, due to restrictions on accessing Google data. The population is densely concentrated in the east and accessibility is increased, whereas rural provinces in the west remain remote. (Photo by Daniel Weiss/Jennifer Rozier/Malaria Atlas Project/University of Oxford)

In this March 3, 2015 photo, a group of California sea lions rest on a large bouy in the San Ignacio lagoon, in the Pacific Ocean, near Guerrero Negro, in Mexico's Baja California peninsula. (Photo by Dario Lopez-Mills/AP Photo)

For more than 2,000 years, women from the Baiga tribe in the highland district of Dindori, in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state, have been tattooed. Sumintra, 25, from Bona village, has the markings across her forehead, legs and arms. The women who work as tattoo artists are knowledgable about the different types of designs and pigments preferred by various tribes, and their meanings are passed to them by their mothers. The tattooing ‘season’ begins with the approach of winter. (Photo by Ronny Sen/WaterAid/The Guardian)

Decaying fishing trawlers known collectively as The Fleetwood Wrecks, are seen at low tide on the banks of the River Wyre in Fleetwood, Britain on September 26, 2023. (Photo by Lee Smith/Reuters)

Autumn colors border a road leading through a small valley near Blankenburg am Harz, Germany, Wednesday, November 1, 2023. (Photo by Matthias Schrader/AP Photo)

American Ballet Theater's dancers are silhouetted as they rehearse for the opening night at the Shanghai Grand Theater in Shanghai, Thursday, November 2, 2023. The American national ballet company is returning to China for the first time in a decade for shows in Shanghai and Beijing in the latest sign strained relations between the United States and China are beginning to thaw. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)