“It had a strange look, like an alien, but it wasn’t angry. It sat still on the branch all the time,” said Kim Hui Yu, who photographed the flat-faced longhorn beetle in the image above on a family trip to Gunung Jerai on Malaysia’s west coast.

A lightbulb in a mosquito net attracted invertebrates overnight. In the morning, she chose the most colourful to photograph. “I want people to know that all creatures, even small ones, count. So don’t destroy the forest.”

The photo, entitled Alien, is one of eight in a biodiversity display at the Natural History Museum’s 2025  exhibition, opening in London on 17 October. The images are past entries to the competition.

The display also includes a table-sized map of biodiversity levels, as measured by the Biodiversity Intactness Index created by the museum’s researchers.

Hannah McCartney, who runs the competition, says the images can have a powerful impact – the aim is to get visitors to care enough that they later take action. A prime example is Innocence Betrayed by Hilary O’Leary, featuring a 4-month-old black rhino calf nuzzling an anti-poaching scout. It had been found lost in the bush.

High and Wild by Marc Graf takes a very different approach to what we might lose. This shot of trees and rocks emerging from sunlit clouds was taken in Berchtesgaden, a national park in the German Alps.

Jaime Culebras’s The Happy Couple zooms in on mating harlequin toads in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Natural Park, Colombia. Most species of harlequin toads are endangered.

Rich Reflections by was photographed off Lord Howe Island between Australia and New Zealand. The snorkeller among the extraordinary seaweeds is marine ranger Caitlin Woods.

A close encounter between a pygmy rabbit and a stink beetle – one of many species that take advantage of rabbit burrows – was captured in Burrow Mates by in Columbia Basin, Washington State.

Flight Paths by Owen Hearn juxtaposes a close view of a red kite with the distant outline of a plane. It was taken at a site in Bedfordshire in the UK once earmarked for London’s third major airport. While the red kite’s recovery is a success story, the UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, says McCartney.

Laurent Ballesta’s Pyramid of Life shows the range of organisms below East Antarctica’s sea ice, including giant ribbon worms and sea stars.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year is now in its 61st year, with judges choosing the best of 60,000 entries, up from 341 in 1965. The winners will be announced on 14 October.

Tropical forests populated with a diversity of seed-dispersing animals can accumulate carbon up to four times as fast as fragmented forests where these animals are absent or their movement is restricted.

“This shows a linkage between animal biodiversity loss and a process that exacerbates climate change,” says at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We’re losing the regrowth potential of tropical forests.”

Animals contain just a tiny fraction of the carbon stored in the environments where they live. But there is increasing recognition their activities can have outsized impacts on their ecosystems’ carbon. One important contribution comes from animals like monkeys, birds and rodents, whose behaviour disperses a great diversity of seeds across a wide area.

Still, “it’s been really hard to translate that to the long-scale processes like the carbon recovery of entire landscapes”, says Fricke.

Fricke and his colleagues analysed more than 3000 plots in tropical forests where trees were growing back – and accumulating carbon – after a disturbance. They then estimated the amount of disruption to the movement and diversity of seed-dispersing animals in each plot. The estimates relied on factors like the amount of forest fragmentation and data from tracked animals.

They found more disruption to the movement of seed dispersers was clearly linked with a lower rate of carbon accumulation. Forests that had the least disruption to their animals’ habits grew four times as fast as the most disrupted ones.

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On average, disruptions to seed-dispersing animals’ diversity and movement reduced the amount of carbon the plots could accumulate by half. This means the disruptions had an even larger negative effect than other factors limiting tree regrowth, such as fires or livestock grazing.

Conversely, forests with the least disruption accumulated carbon even faster than monoculture tree plantations. “Natural growth amplified by animals offers a low cost and biodiversity-positive restoration strategy,” says Fricke.

Previously, ecological models suggested seed dispersers could have a substantial effect on carbon. But this study “improves our understanding of how important these animals could be”, says at Yale University. “And it shows that they’re going to be important.”