Spotted: Terrestrial Wildlife Winner. At first glance, this might seem like a mother snow leopard playing with her kitten, but a closer look reveals a lack of distinct spots on the cloudy fur of the smaller cat. The fully grown feline is actually a Pallas’s cat, or manul, a house cat–size wildcat whose range across Central Asia overlaps with the mountains, steppe, and high deserts favored by its better-known cousin, the snow leopard. 

Despite sharing a similar predilection for cold climates and high altitudes, there’s scant scientific evidence of snow leopards preying on Pallas’s cats. So when the photographer Donglin Zhou saw this snow leopard stealthily approaching a mother Pallas’s cat on the Quinhai-Tibet Plateau, she was astonished. “Both species are hard to see at any time,” she said, “let alone together.” Zhou had spent days watching the mother cat feed her kittens, and was devastated to see the doting mother snatched by a snow leopard. Upon seeing her in the leopard’s jaws, she said, “the tears cannot stop coming into my eyes.” 

After the snow leopard left the scene, Zhou, her guide, and forest rangers decided to leave some road-killed pikas outside the den for the three kittens. For three weeks, they guarded and fed the kittens, until the tiny Pallas’s cats were ready to leave the safety of their den and begin to fend for themselves. #

Nose to Nose: Human/Nature Winner. Since 2006, developers have constructed dozens of new subdivisions on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, transforming bushland that once sheltered kangaroos, wombats, flying foxes, and other wildlife into tidy suburban streets. As the built environment encroaches on the wild, a growing number of displaced animals are struck by cars. Those that survive might, if lucky, find themselves in the care of a wildlife rehabilitation shelter like the Joey and Bat Sanctuary near Melbourne. 

The photographer Douglas Gimesy was documenting work at the sanctuary last year when he met a bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus) whose mother had been killed by a car. A Good Samaritan had thought to check the dead marsupial’s pouch and found the four-month-old joey inside, still alive. Gimesy watched a young veterinary student bottle-feed the orphaned wombat. When the feeding was over, the student touched her nose to the joey’s in a tender moment of interspecies bonding. #

Stunning Cephalopod: Aquatic Life Finalist. The iridescent symmetry of this blanket octopus plays a key role in the cephalopod’s success as a predator. Four species of blanket octopuses roam tropical and subtropical seas—including the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Mediterranean—searching for fish and crustaceans to eat. #

Regeneration: Landscape, Waterscapes, and Flora Winner
. Like many ecosystems in the western half of North America, many forests in Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada, benefit from naturally occurring, low-intensity wildfires. Fires replenish soil nutrients, keep forests from becoming homogenous, and spur the growth of berry bushes that grizzly bears and other wildlife love to munch. Yet since 1913, park managers have actively suppressed wildfires; across the 227,000-acre park, only eight fires in the 20th century grew to larger than 100 acres before firefighters extinguished them. Land managers across Alberta adopted similar practices. As all this dead timber collides with the hotter, drier conditions wrought by climate change, abnormally large and intense wildfires have exploded. While fire-adapted forests can recover from low-intensity wildfires, research from across the Rocky Mountains has shown that tree seedlings struggle to take hold in the wake of mega-fires.

 Today in Jasper National Park, as elsewhere in western North America, forest managers are trying to reverse a century of misguided management by igniting controlled burns and letting some wildfires burn. The resulting landscapes may look different than the swaths of green spruce and pine that park visitors are accustomed to, but as this haunting image of a burned spruce forest shows, they can be equally captivating. #

Life on the Edge
: Terrestrial Wildlife Finalist. Nubian ibexes live on the knife-edge of survival, in deserts with scant vegetation and harsh climates. They also live at the literal edge of cliffs, with little but space and steep drops for company. Such vertiginous topography helps deter predators like leopards and wolves. In Israel’s Avdat Nature Park, scientists have watched Nubian ibexes leave their newborns on cliff outcroppings too precipitous for most mammals to reach, then return for feedings until the young grew agile enough to traverse the sheer cliffs on their own. #

Coyote Crossing: Grand Prize Winner. How did the coyote cross the road? If the coyote is among the 4,000 or so living in the Chicago metro area, the answer may be that it used a bridge to avoid being hit by a car. Across the United States, motor-vehicle collisions are responsible for at least 1 million vertebrate deaths a day, and Chicago is no exception. Coyotes typically live only about three years in the Windy City, compared with 10 years on average elsewhere in the wild, and up to 18 years in captivity. Their most common cause of death is being struck by a car.

 But, like many wild animals living in densely populated urban environments—including those featured in Corey Arnold’s Grand-Prize-winning photo story—coyotes have found ingenious ways to coexist with humans. In Chicago, where Arnold tagged along with scientists from the Cook County Urban Coyote Research Project, coyotes regularly use train trestles like this one to circumvent busy highways. They also shift their normal behavioral patterns to hunt mostly at night, when they’re less likely to encounter humans, and they seem to avoid trash in favor of Chicago’s live deer, rabbits, and rodents. #

Magical Mushroom: Art of Nature Winner. Is it waves crashing onto shore? A landscape of furrowed canyons? The topography of a distant planet? People seeing J Fritz Rumpf’s photograph for the first time have transposed all kinds of fantasies onto its hypnotic patterns, but no one, Rumpf says, has correctly guessed what they’re looking at: the gills of a fungi from the genus Lactarius, better known as milk cap mushrooms for the milky, latexlike liquid they ooze when cut. Rumpf was foraging for mushrooms in Arizona’s White Mountains one August afternoon when he picked up this one. Unsure if it was edible, he returned it the forest floor—and happened to notice the colors of its gills. Many of the dozens of species of milk caps that grow in the American Southwest “bruise” when chemicals in their fruiting bodies are exposed to air, turning them the murky blue-green that caught Rumpf’s eye. #

All My Children: Human/Nature Finalist. Chimpanzees share nearly 99 percent of their DNA with human beings. At the Lwiro Primate Sanctuary in Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this genetic bond is perhaps reflected in the relationships that form between orphaned chimps and their human caregivers. Wild chimps typically stay close to their mothers until they’re about 5 years old, so when a mother is killed by poachers, the separation can cause irreparable harm for young, developing chimps. Many of the orphaned chimpanzees brought to the sanctuary by Congolese wildlife officials arrive carrying both physical and emotional wounds. The healing at the sanctuary goes both ways: Some of the caregivers who feed, cuddle, and help rehabilitate chimps are themselves victims of sexual abuse who have found independence and employment working with chimpanzees. The photographer Marcus Westberg, who spent weeks at the sanctuary, said that caregivers treat the chimpanzees as tenderly if they’re human children, and the young chimps, likewise, often act like kids—alternately playful, mischievous, and vulnerable. #

Catch Me If You Can: Winged Life Winner. As a member of the heron family, the little egret is typically a stealthy hunter, standing still in shallow water or waiting in a roost for unsuspecting fish to swim by. Or the bird shuffles its yellow feet to scare up prey, which it then pierces with its sharp beak. This egret in a lake near Xiamen, China, however, was caught off guard when the small fish it had been eyeing was chased clear out of the water—by a much larger fish. The photographer Xiaoping Lin used high-speed continuous shooting to capture the startled egret as it lifted off above the churning waves. The resulting image of fleeting action permanently frozen in a palette of whites and silvers is “like a poem,” Lin said. #