A volunteer approaches a male toad to pick him up from a road near Berlin on March 18, 2012 in Gueterfelde, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

A golden pheasant and squirrels are seen in Lushan County of Pingdingshan City, central China's Henan Province, November 14, 2017. (Photo by Liu Xianguo/Xinhua/Barcroft Images)

Festival-goers take photo inside of Spectra, a seven-story spiral walkway up to a viewing deck, at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, on April 17, 2022. (Photo by Valerie Macon/AFP Photo)

A ghost glass frog in the Chocó rainforest, Ecuador in November 2020. The marbled swirling “hypnotising” eyes are thought to be helpful in attracting a mate. (Photo by David Weiller/WENN)

Midas, a four-month-old kitten born with four ears, is pictured at her home in Ankara, Turkey on November 19, 2021. (Photo by Cagla Gurdogan/Reuters)

A moon bear rests in a pool inside an enclosure at the Vietnam bear rescue centre, in Tam Dao national park, Vinh Phuc, Vietnam, 09 July 2019. The center is operated by international organization Animals Asia. There are currently 184 bears living at the the Vietnam Bear Rescue Centre. It is estimated that there are less than a few hundred bears left in the wild in Vietnam. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural development, around 600 bears are still being kept on farms. In Vietnam, Animals Asia has rescued a total of 209 sun bears and moon bears. (Photo by Minh Hoang/EPA/EFE/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Beautiful, strange and occasionally alarming pictures from the shortlist for this year’s Wellcome image awards – which celebrate the very best in science photography and imaging – from an x-ray of a bat to a micrograph of a kidney stone. The exhibition opens on 12 March at three science centres and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Photo: Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of an Arabidopsis thaliana flower, also commonly known as thale cress. Some of the anthers are open, revealing pollen grains ready for dispersal. Arabidopsis was the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced and is widely used as a model organism in molecular and plant biology. Horizontal width of image is 1200 microns. Magnification 100x. (Photo by Stefan Eberhard/Wellcome Images)

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)