Entered by researchers from around the world, the BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology image competition celebrates nature's will to survive and thrive.
"Saiga fights in spring, outside of the tournament season, are quieter and more about training than determining status. However, the males take every opportunity to practice," says this year's winner Andrey Giljov, a Senior Lecturer at Saint Petersburg State University.
"To photograph the saigas from ground level, we had to set up a camouflaged hide near this so-called social arena. We had to conceal ourselves in the dark to avoid scaring off approaching saigas or making unnecessary noise; otherwise, the animals would not come close."
The competition has four categories: 'Collective Social Behaviour', 'Life in Motion', 'Colourful Strategies', and 'Research in Action'. Anyone affiliated with a research institution is welcome to participate.
The winning photograph by Sritam Kumar Sethy captured newly hatched nymphs of Acanthocoris scaber clustered tightly together on the underside of a leaf. Sritam explains that this grouping behaviour serves multiple purposes: "By coming together, they enhance their protection against predators, reducing the chances of any individual becoming prey. This collective arrangement also provides better access to vital resources like food and moisture, which is crucial during their vulnerable early stages of life."
Second place went to Associate Professor Nick Royle, a behavioural ecologist and conservation biologist at the University of Exeter, for his image of a mother burying beetle feeding her developing larvae on the carcass of a mouse, regurgitating processed meat to her begging offspring.
"This behaviour normally occurs underground, so is not usually visible to us, but is here pictured in the lab where these burying beetles are used as a model to understand the evolution of social behaviours such as parental care," explains Royle.
The 'Life in Motion' category was won by a digital artist who created an image of Pterosaurs in flight above the Jurassic Hebridean Basin.
"The Jurassic Hebridean Basin once covered what is now Scotland. This water body formed a pathway to the Boreal Sea, an area currently known as the North Pole. The sea was teeming with life, and recent discoveries of margin-marine deposits have yielded two pterosaur skeletons: a 2.5-meter wingspan pterosaur known as Dearc, and a smaller, crested pterosaur called Ceoptera," says Natalia Jagielska, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
"Despite their differing cranial anatomies, teeth morphology, and wing shapes, these pterosaurs could interact and compete for food during periods of environmental stress. Set 170 million years ago in the Middle Jurassic, this image portrays these flying reptiles as they hunt along the shoreline."
Alwin Hardenbol, a Postdoctoral researcher at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, captured a remarkable photo of a breaching humpback whale from a rib boat in Varanger, Norway.
"To photograph breaching properly, you need to be at the ready constantly as it happens very spontaneously, and the best moments are over in just a few seconds. Breaching is a fascinating behaviour from a scientific perspective, as it is still inconclusive what purpose it serves. Researchers have suggested multiple reasons, including communication, play, or the loosening of skin parasites," says Hardenbol.
"In terms of communication, breaching, along with other surface behaviours like tail slapping and flipper slapping, produces loud sounds, especially underwater, and can be heard from a considerable distance. That breaching creates such a loud sound is probably unsurprising, as these animals can weigh up to 40 metric tonnes. It's unbelievable to imagine how such an animal can even jump out of the water like that. To achieve a nice breach (> 90% out of the water), Humpback whales must move around 29 km per hour."
Dr Abhijeet Bayani, a biologist from the Indian Institute of Science, captured the winning image for the 'Colourful strategies' category.
Some beetles use clever visual tricks called deimatic displays to scare or confuse predators. For example, they might suddenly reveal eyespots, markings that look like large eyes, to mimic larger predators or make themselves appear bigger or more threatening than they really are. These displays are a great example of how insects use colour as part of their survival strategy.
"The frog's camouflage serves a dual purpose: it helps evade predators such as snakes and birds while also providing the perfect disguise for ambushing prey," says runner up Sethy. "With patience and precision, it hunts small insects, millipedes, and worms, relying not on speed but on invisibility and timing."
Nick Royle at the University of Exeter won Best in Category for 'Research in Action.' His photo captures a male blue ground beetle (Carabus intricatus), which was photographed on a spring night in a temperate rainforest in southwest England. The beetle waits in a falcon tube before being fitted with a miniature, backpack-like radio tag that allows the team to track its movements and behaviour over the following two weeks as it searches for food and mates.
This camera-trap image was captured in Scotland's Cairngorms as part of a non-invasive monitoring study on capercaillie. The capercaillie is a ground-nesting bird at risk of extinction in the UK, with fewer than 600 individuals left. It shows a mother capercaillie in the background, carefully watching over her brood of four poults as they take a dust bath.