Here are the winners of the 2025 fauna photo photo competition

Nature can be equally majestic, comforting and terrifying. The winning inscriptions of the BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology Image Competition illustrate this complexity with the shovel.

Biologists, zoologists and paleontologists around the world have sent bids to this year’s competition. The photos were sorted in four categories: “collective social behavior”, “life in motion”, “colorful strategies” and “research in action”. But the general winner (seen in the image in mind above) was a snapshot taken by Andrey Giljov, showing two Antélopes de Saiga Males in a fight match as part of their preparation for the Mates season; This naturally involves heads with potential rivals.

“Saiga is fighting in the spring, outside the tournament season, is quieter and more on the training than to determine the status. However, men seize all occasions to train,” said Giljov, vertebrate zoologist and lecturer at the State University of Saint Petersburg in Russia, in an editorial detailing the winners of the competition.

The annual photo competition, now in its second year, is a joint venture of BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology magazines; It is the successor to the competitions that were led separately by the two journals. The photos are judged by the editors of the journals and the upper members of the editorial committee. The winning entries this year and the nearby seconds presented some of the largest creatures on the earth as well as its smallest.

Example, the incredible photo of Alwin Hardenbol of a humpback whale that strikes he has captured from a rigid inflatable boat in Varanger, Norway.

“Violation is a fascinating behavior from a scientific point of view, because it is still not conclusive how it serves,” said Hardenbol, a researcher at the Natural Resources Institute Finland whose photo was a finalist in the Life in Motion category. “It is incredible to imagine how such an animal can even jump water like that.”

Sritam Kumar Sethy, student at the University of Berhampur in India, won the category of collective social behavior for his newly hatching photograph Acanthocoris Scaber (a kind of nymphs on foot insects) nymphs gather on the underside of a sheet – a survival strategy to have strength in number. “By meeting, they improve their protection against predators, reducing the chances of becoming prey,” said Sethy.

The entries also captured the endless fight for resources between animals, such as the photo of Delip K. Das of a Haliastur Indian (A medium-sized bird of prey also called a Brahminy kite) having to make an additional effort for its dinner.

“A Brahminy kite had just taken an eel-a big fish still hearing. While the kite was fighting to secure its flights, another challenger appeared, trying to divert the meal,” said Das, whose entrance was not won, but was distinguished as highly recommended. “The dramatic moment took place above the waters bordered by mangroves, reflecting the intensity and agility of raptors in the wild.”

Some images have not highlighted the current state of the natural world but its distant past. The digital artist Natalia Jagielsk won the Life in Motion category for his illustration of pterosaurs flying over the Jurassic Hebrident basin, covering what is now called Scotland. Jagielsk, a postdoctoral scholarship of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has based its work on the recent discovery of two skeletons of pterosaurs belonging to different species in the region.

“Despite their different cranial anatomies, their morphology of teeth and their wings forms, these pterosaurs could interact and compete for food during periods of environmental stress,” said Jagielsk, who was part of a team that described one of these species, Hairdresser. “Fixed 170 million years ago in the average Jurassic, this image depicts these flying reptiles when they hunt the shore.”

My favorite selection is endearing, raw or both, depending on your tolerance for bugs and regurgitation. Nick Royle, finalist in the category of collective and social behavior, took a photo of a mother Nicrophorus Vespiloides (a kind of buried scarab) nourishing her young people – by what I mean, spitting the remains of a buried mouse carcass. In addition to this unique food strategy, buried beetles are also one of the few insects that often share custody of their offspring, both parents helping with breeding.

“This behavior occurs normally underground, so is generally not visible for us, but is here illustrated in the laboratory, where these buried beetles are used as a model to understand the evolution of social behavior such as parental care,” said Royle, behavioral ecologist and conservation biologist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. “These beetles work together to bury carcasses in order to avoid competition from other Carrion users and, once underground, treat the carcass, remove the fur, make it roll up in a ball and treat it with antimicrobial secretions to fight against bacteria and mushrooms that would otherwise consume this precious resource.”

Well, I will certainly appreciate the homemade meals of my parents more.

There are many more breathtaking images of this year’s competition that can be seen here.