Calendar competition: the winners

Winner – January

Bug Watch

A female European dwarf mantis (Ameles spallanzania) rides a wristwatch on the Croatian island of Prviç.

At up to 3 centimetres long, this type of dwarf mantis is not the smallest of the more than 2000 known mantis species – that honour goes to the 1-centimetre Bolbe pygmaea – while the largest can grow to 15 centimetres or more. In captivity, the females of some species such as the European or praying mantis (Mantis religiosa) have often been observed to kill and eat the male during sex, although it remains controversial whether this deadly love bite is commonly delivered in the wild.

The female dwarf mantis, for her part, displays manners as dainty as her form and always declines to eat her mate.

(Image: Nikola Vlahov)

Winner – February

Float Like an Eagle

A feather floats serenely on water. This image shows a body feather, also known as a contour feather, from an African fish eagle (Haliaeetus vocifer) kept at the International Centre for Birds of Prey in Gloucestershire, UK. This feather floated for days with no sign of sinking.

Natural oils and its fine structure make it highly water-repellent, which is vital for the fish eagle, as despite being a powerful bird with a 2-metre wingspan it will sometimes catch a catfish too heavy for it to lift, so it must swim to shore with its prey. Scientists are studying feathers in the hope of making new materials with similar properties.

(Image: Linda Wright)

Winner – March

Synchronised Snacking

When Des Cannon saw what he thought were caterpillars nibbling at a silver birch tree in his garden in Bray, Ireland, he moved in to flick them off the leaves – and was startled to see them all rearing up at him in synchrony. This behaviour is peculiar to larvae of the sawfly family, in this case the birch sawfly. It is named for the female’s ovipositor, which looks like a saw and is used to cut holes in plants where she can lay her eggs, giving them a measure of protection from predators.

This synchronised behaviour is probably aimed at warding off predators too. It worked for this larval display team at least, as Cannon decided to take their photo instead of picking them off his tree.

(Image: Des Cannon)

Winner – April

Ships of the Desert

On what was once the bed of the Aral Sea, a shoal of camels shelters from the sun under a pair of redundant fishing boats. The Aral Sea was the fourth largest inland body of water in the world. In the 1960s the Soviet government diverted water from two tributaries of the Aral, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, to irrigate cotton fields. This caused the sea to retreat dramatically. It shrank to a salty puddle, killing most aquatic life and leaving behind tracts of polluted desert.

For the northern part of the Aral Sea, within Kazakhstan, there is hope: the building of the 13- kilometre-long Kok-Aral dam here has allowed the sea to advance again. But for the southern remnant of the sea, which is mainly in poorer Uzbekistan, the outlook remains dry and bleak.

(Image: Nick Hannes)

Winner – May

Sand Dollar

A young sea urchin of the species Clypeaster subdepressus is seen in polarised light. Less than a millimetre across even with its spines, the juvenile form shown here has recently metamorphosed from the free-swimming larval stage and is beginning its new life on the sea floor, consuming organic material it scrapes from the surface of sand grains. It will eventually grow into a thick disc-shaped creature 20 centimetres across, known colloquially as a sea biscuit.

This and other disc-shaped urchins are known as sand dollars. In 2008, scientists at the University of Washington discovered that the larvae of one species of sand dollar, Dendraster excentricus, can clone themselves when at risk of predation – presumably increasing the chance that some larvae will survive to enjoy a long adulthood of sucking sand.

(Image: Bruno Vellutini)

Winner – June

Tunnel Vision

Raspberries and other soft fruit grow under massed ranks of polythene tunnels at the Scottish Crop Research Institute just outside Dundee, UK. The institute develops new varieties of fruit, looking for genes that mark desirable traits in terms of taste, appearance and resistance to disease.

Commercial growers use polytunnels to pamper their fruit at the risk of giving pests such as the raspberry beetle the perfect environment in which to thrive. A new project at SCRI aims to foil this particular pest by breeding raspberries whose flowers lack beetle-tempting chemicals in their scent: the plants must smell unattractive to beetles yet stay tasty for humans.

(Image: Phil Taylor)

Winner – July

Death in Bloom

The orchid mantis, Hymenopus coronatus,waits for its next meal to land. The mantis inhabits various types of flower, and as each individual grows its colouring changes to resemble that of its chosen bloom. So convincingly does it blend in with the floral backdrop that bees, wasps and flies attracted to the orchid are unlikely to suspect that this particular set of petals will pounce on them.

During courtship, males of the orchid mantis will tap their antennae and forelegs against the females’ wings to try to get their interest. This ritual has been observed by insect breeders, who seek out the orchid mantis because of its beauty and rarity.

(Image: Paul Wagner)

Winner – August

Stellar Starfish

A basket star (Astrocladus euryale) perches on coral and sifts the water for food. Like their fellow echinoderms, including urchins and sea cucumbers, basket stars have five-fold symmetry, but they elaborate on this with their extraordinary many-fingered arms, which are a little like slender coral branches. The arms are covered in mucus and form a sticky net that is used for filter-feeding, picking up passing plankton and other morsels.

(Image: Anthony Wooldridge)

Winner – September

Blade of Light

On an unusually still day, the tip of a turbine blade catches the sun above the snowy hills of Shetland in the far north of the UK. Here at the Burradale wind farm, the five turbines – named Mina, Brenda, Betsy, Sally and Karen – are among the most productive in the world. In 2005 the average power they generated was 57.9 per cent of their maximum capacity, a record for any wind farm.

A proposed new wind farm, which would feature 200 huge turbines and a capacity of 550 megawatts, almost 200 times that of Burradale, has proved controversial. Opponents of the scheme object on the grounds of its visual effect and the damage they say it would do to wildlife and carbon-storing peat bogs. If the project goes ahead, an undersea cable will carry the power it generates to the mainland, more than 200 kilometres away to the south.

(Image: William Spence)

Winner – October

Frond Memories

A young fern frond unfurls by the side of a road in Herefordshire, UK. With their delicately branching form, akin to the recurring geometric patterns of fractals, which look similar at different scales, ferns fascinated the Victorians.

During the 19th century many amateur botanists collected ferns and grew them in glass Wardian cases, invented by one Nathaniel Ward in the 1820s to maintain humidity and keep out the pollution that had choked ferns in his garden. The craze was named pteridomania, after the Latin name of the plant group to which ferns belong, Pteridophyta.

As any pteridomaniac will tell you, the unfurling style of leaf emergence shown here, known as circinate vernation, is characteristic of ferns.

(Image: Chris Coram)

Winner – November

Mystery Object

A deep-sea creature? A nerve cell? An interstellar nebula? Nope. It is a firework, exploding in the sky above Cambridge, UK. The long exposure captures the evolution of the firework’s tracery, which is arguably more beautiful than our ordinary real-time view of pyrotechnics. Perhaps the image gives us a gauzy impression of what it might be like to stand outside time and instantly comprehend the four-dimensional space-time of our universe in all its glory. Then again, maybe it’s just a pretty picture.

(Image: Nigel Cooke)

Winner – December

Frost Flair

Fern frost grows on a windowpane. When the temperature outside drops low enough to cool the inner surface of the window below freezing point, moisture indoors can turn directly to ice on contact with the glass.

The first ice crystals tend to nucleate on dirt, scratches or other imperfections in the glass, so defining the first sketchy outlines of the frost pattern. Narrow fingers of ice gradually grow across the window, with new crystalline outgrowths forming side branches which in turn give rise to yet more branches, producing a fern-like pattern. Changes in temperature and humidity can switch the ice crystals from growing in narrow spikes to forming broader hexagonal “leaves”, and back again.

This process also crafts the intricate patterns of a snowflake. Here, the image of a frosted windowpane has been digitally reflected to give it a four-fold symmetry.

(Image: Jay Spivack)

The following are all runners-up

Match Made in Heaven 3

“Took these about a year ago, just after buying a macro lens. I’m fascinated by everyday processes that we never get to see up close. I clamped matches in front of a black background, pre-focused, lit each with another match and snapped the results. I love them.”

(Image: Stephen Sadler, UK)

Ladybug on top of a Moon Jellyfish

“A bewildered ladybug has found its way onto a common jellyfish on the east coast of Jutland, Denmark. Two widely different creatures in both colour and species. My fascination with the biological macro world at its best.”

(Image: Mikkel Vind Lorez, Denmark)

Venus Transit

“The Venus transit is a rare phenomenon that was captured in this photograph taken at dawn on Boston’s South Shore, 2004.”

(Image: Thomas Miller, US)

Salar de Uyuni Sunrise

“The sun peaking over the horizon in the Salar de Uyuni in remote Bolivia, lighting up the hexagonal crystals. Shows how harsh nature can be, yet so elegant and beautiful at the same time.”

(Image: Clint Burkinshaw, Australia)

Furry Spider

“A small spider on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada.”

(Image: Damon Clarke at MacroPhotography.com, Canada)

Condom

(Image: Richard Thomas, UK)

Landscape, Tajikistan

“The Khaburabot pass at 3252 metres in the Pamir mountains in the autonomous republic of Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan, in spring.”

(Image: Nick Hannes, Belgium)

My Chubby Caterpillar

“One of the reasons I take the photos I do is to share something people haven’t seen or considered. We have all seen a caterpillar, but few of us have been close enough to really consider them as marvels of nature. I took this photo at a science museum in North Carolina because it brought me the same amusement and wonder that brought me to a career in science.”

(Image: Paul Wagner, US)

Stars above the Bridge

“Ayub and Lansdowne Bridges connected Sukkur with rest of Pakistan. Lansdowne was constructed in late 19th century by the British for crossing the mighty Indus river. The beautiful, arched Ayub bridge was constructed in the 1960s. Having no pillars, once these bridges were unique engineering marvels.”

(Image: Agha Waseem Ahmed, Pakistan)

Racing with the Moon

“Today’s technological advancement is largely indebted to the industrial revolution, and at the heart of the industrial revolution was steam power. Yesterday’s steam locomotives once accelerated technological progress and then went into oblivion. This steam loco is stationed at Sukkur, Sindh, Pakistan.”

(Image: Agha Waseem Ahmed, Pakistan)

Event Horizon

“A frog leaping out of a pond producing waves while in the eye of the whirl. It appeared to me as if the frog was jumping away from the gravitational field of a black hole.”

(Image: Agha Waseem Ahmed, Pakistan)

Alien in the Bedroom

“Simple image-processing techniques such as stacking and stitching are making it easier for a layman or amateur scientist to make valid contributions to the scientific community in areas such as microscopy or astronomy by producing images that were not possible a shot time ago. A common zebra jumping spider is shot using multiple images that have been combined to remove the shallow depth of focus that would normally obscure viewing such small subjects in their entirety.”

(Image: Tim Evison, Denmark)

Oil on Water

“This photo was taken at the La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, in May 2008. The tar pits are a natural oil seep with oil coming to the surface throughout the park, both directly through the soil and in water features. These tar pits became the resting place for unlucky prehistoric animals, including mammoths, sabre-tooth cats and wolves. Here, a thin layer of oil lies on top of a pond. Light waves reflected from the top surface of the thin film of oil interfere with light waves reflected from the bottom surface, producing the colourful pattern seen at the surface, beautiful and deadly.”

(Image: Helen Brand, Australia)

Mandelbrot Drop

“An attempt to show two amazing things in one: first the brilliance of a Mandelbrot fractal, the second that the tiniest droplet of water can refract an amazing image, even when dripping from your tap.”

(Image: Chris Cupit, UK)

Fluorescent Polyps

“This image is an aquatic macro shot showing several different kinds of Zoanthus colonial anemone polyps. The image is taken in pitch darkness using a special technique which stimulates and captures just the fluorescent pigmentation within the anemones.”

(Image: John Clipperton, UK)