A photographer in Somerset, South West England captured the mating rituals of toads as several males attempt to mate with one female all at once. (Photo by John Waters/NPL)

Hidden Britain category winner. Garden Spider by Alan Smith from Reading, Berkshire. (Photo by Alan Smith/British Wildlife Photography Awards/PA Wire Press Association)

Kea are the only true alpine parrots in the world and thrive as cunning opportunists in the freezing conditions of the Southern Alps. Kea are thought to have developed their wide array of food-finding strategies during the last great ice age, where they learned to adapt using their unusual powers of curiosity. (Photo by Tom Walker/BBC Pictures/The Guardian)

A close up of a caracal lynx's face looking into a camera on January 2014 in Western Cape, South Africa. (Photo by Dale Morris/Barcroft Media)

Fish-eye lens with a twist: the Norwegian photographer Brutus Ostling uses bait to lure a herring gull for a close-up in September 2022. (Photo by Brutus Ostling/Solent News)

3-year-old Myla Mills plays with a two day old lamb in a toy pram in her family's farmyard in Arley, Worcestershire, United Kingdom on January 28, 2023. Early lambs are produced when the ram is free to tup the ewes over winter. (Photo by Peter Lopeman/Alamy Live News)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)