Imperiled beauty: The best nature photos of 2026

This photo of a white humpback calf won the competition's top prize. Photographer Jono Allen took the picture off Tonga in the South Pacific, a region where humpback whales have long been strictly protected. Albinism occurs in only one in about 40,000 newborns of these marine giants. "Such rare sightings show what is possible when conservation is promoted," wrote the jury.

In Katmai National Park, Alaska, a brown bear leapt into a swarm of sockeye salmon – and earned photographer Charlie Wemyss-Dunn gold in the "Animals in Their Habitat" category. This year, the jury of the international World Nature Photography Awards (WPNA) selected the world's best animal and nature photographs of the year for the sixth time.

This Mozambique ghost goby is barely visible, camouflaged from predators by the orange, flower-like dots on a coral. Photographer Simon Biddie photographed the small, transparent fish in the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt, winning the "Nature Art" category.

A squadron of penguins swims through the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula. Matthew Sharp won second prize in the "Underwater" category for his "split-level photo," which shows the peaks of the mountain ranges above the diving animals. From thousands of entries submitted from 51 countries, the jury selected three winning images in each of 14 categories.

Photographer Michael Stavrakakis captured this heartwarming moment between a polar bear mother and her six-month-old cub in Spitsbergen for posterity. "This year's winners are a powerful reminder of the wonders of our planet – but also how important it is to protect this splendor," explains Adrian Dinsdale, co-founder of the WPNA.

For this moss moth larva in China, the time of transformation has begun: it has spun a silk web around its body and will now hang in the air, enclosed in its cocoon, for several months until it spreads its wings for the first time. Photographer Minghui Yuan won first place in the "Invertebrate Behavior" category with his artistic-looking photo.

"Arrival" is the name of the picture of a heron in Florida, with which photographer Fenqiang Liu won the "Bird Behavior" category. The photo was taken in spring, when herons prepare for courtship and grow additional long feathers on their backs.

With this image, entitled "Shared Wonder," American photographer Mary Schrader won the "Animal Portraits" category: a young female gorilla in a national park in Uganda observes a butterfly that is the same color as her eyes.

A lonely witness to climate change: a dried-up tree in Ilha do Cardoso State Park in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. Photographer Thiago Campi was awarded third place in the landscape category for his beautiful yet bleak image entitled "Climate Change."

Preeti and Prashant Chacko from the United Arab Emirates won in the black-and-white category. Their photo, entitled "The Rugby Players," shows rhinos and herons encountering each other in the Solio Game Reserve in Kenya.

Garbage instead of icebergs: Churchill, Canada, is known as the "polar bear capital of the world" — here, a polar bear inspects a pile of electronic waste. This shot, which is hard to beat in terms of symbolic power, won photographer Robert Gloeckner first place in the "Urban Wildlife" category.