A spectacular showcase of animal pictures from 2025

This mouse is seemingly trying to revive its unconscious cage mate by tugging at its tongue to clear its airways. Researchers discovered that, when presented with an anaesthetised mouse, some mice act like tiny first-aiders and paw, groom and bite the unresponsive mouse, suggesting that care-giving behaviour is more common in the animal kingdom than we thought.

A male Amazon river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) is captured rolling on its back to fire a jet of urine into the air. This bizarre behaviour seems to send messages to other dolphins, possibly in a similar way to how land mammals use scent marking, with other males appearing to seek out the urine as it falls back to the water.

Perched on the left of this branch is a superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus) trying to fend off a cuckoo. Scientists discovered that more than 20 bird species use a similar “whining” alarm call to warn other birds of nearby cuckoos, which sneakily lay eggs in the nests of other birds to avoid parenting duties.

Weaver ants (Oecophylla smaragdina) are pictured rolling up a piece of lined paper by locking together in a long chain. Each ant uses its mandibles to hold onto the abdomen of the ant in front, a technique that enables them to curl up leaves for building their nests. Researchers discovered that individual ants can pull nearly 60 times their own body weight, but in a team of 15, they can shift over 100 times their body weight.

A live colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) was captured on film for the first time. But while these molluscs are thought to grow up to 7 metres long, the squid caught on camera was just a baby, at 30 centimetres in length. The precious image was taken by a boat from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a US-based non-profit organisation, which was live-streaming footage from deep in the Southern Ocean near the South Sandwich Islands.

This octopus is being fooled by an illusion that makes it think that a fake arm, made of a white gel, is actually its own. We already knew that humans can be tricked into thinking a fake arm is their real one, but scientists made the fascinating discovery that we share this quirk with octopuses.