2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition Picture: Jonathan Diaz-Marba. In search of food – Runner up: Behaviour. I watched feeding griffon vultures searching inside the ribcage of a large mammal. I tried my luck using the camera inside the carcass, shooting from a hide with the help of a trigger wire. Andorra, Spain.

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition Picture: Imre Potyó. Dancing with stars – Overall winner and Winner: Behaviour. This photo captures the courtship dance of the short-lived adult mayflies on the bank of the Rába River, a tributary of the Danube in Hungary. The life of an adult mayfly is very short. They hatch from their juvenile aquatic form, mate in this fantastic spectacle, and then perish. The swarming dates are unpredictable and the dance might last only a couple of hours. The mayflies start to swarm after sunset and do not leave the vicinity of the water surface during their courtship. At the beginning, females and males fly above the water surface where they copulate. After that the females begin their upstream-directed compensatory flight, which ends when they deposit their eggs onto the water surface. This shot captures the fantastic energy and chaos of the mayflies’ dance and the mood of the night time too. Nikon D90 + Sigma 17-70mm f2.8-4.5 lens. Rába river, Hungary. to the asphalt roads of the bridge and perish immediately. The team of the Danube Research Institute in cooperation with the Environmental Optics Laboratory plan to solve this biooptical and environmental problem. This image is very precious to me as I can draw the attention to these spectacular water insects and their complex ecological light trap, which endanger their survival. Rába river, Hungary.

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition Picture: Mark Cowan Butterflies and caiman – Special commendation. Colourful butterflies gather on the head of this caiman to collect salt - an important mineral for their survival. This photo was taken while on a scientific expedition to the Amazon Los Amigos Conservation Concession, Peru.

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition. Picture: Alexandre Bonnefoy Fubuki (snow storm) – Special commendation. Japanese macaques are the most northern-living, non-human primates and survive in the coldest conditions. They huddle in small family groups to keep warm. This behaviour is peculiar to the monkeys in Shodoshima and in Nagano.

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition. Picture: Nick Robertson-Brown. Departing eagle ray – Winner: Evolutionary Biology. An eagle ray swims over the reef with its prey, having dug it up from the sandy sea-bed. Eagle rays have evolved very long tails but this is the longest that I have ever seen. Grand Cayman, Caribbean.

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition. Picture: Prasenjeet Yadav Speeding divergence – Special commendation (Publisher’s choice). The Superb fan-throated lizard is a native to a small high-elevation, iron-rich and humid, plateau in the northern Western Ghats of India has been converted into one of Asia’s largest wind farms.

Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition Picture:Tane Sinclair-Taylor. In a world without colour – Winner: Ecology and Environmental Science. A solitary juvenile clown fish stands out in its colourless habitat among the tentacles of the sea anemone. This photo was shot during a research cruise documenting devastating post-bleaching coral mortality in the Farasan Banks in the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia.

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition. Picture: Clare Collins Carbon nanotube jellyfish – Special commendation. Seemingly a swarm of jellyfish, this image was actually created using carbon nanotubes grown in a pillar formation. The metal disks that make up the jellyfish bodies are made by ‘sputtering’ charged aluminium and iron ions onto a surface to deposit a thin film of the metals. Cambridge, UK.

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition. Picture: Tyler Square. The spiralled snake axis – Runner up: Micro-imaging. During early growth and development, most vertebrate animals look quite similar. Here the 5mm long elongated body of the snake develops as a spiral to fit inside the egg. Boulder, Colorado, USA

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition Picture: Tegwen Gadais Les artistes – Runner up: Ecology and Environmental Science. This photograph was taken on Royal Bay located on the island of South Georgia, where I observed Gentoo penguins seemingly “decorating” their nest with guano – their excrement.

2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition. Picture: Fredrik Pleijel. Polychaetous worm with engine and wagons – Runner up: Evolutionary Biology. This trainworm, which is 35mm from head to tail, lives on the sea floor. Portaferry, UK.

Must not publish before Friday September 23 2016 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition Picture: María Carbajo Sánchez In balance – Winner: Micro-imaging Electron microscopy reveals the alien landscape of the surface of an activated carbon grain. It’s a lot like photography but instead of light, electron microscopes use a beam of electrons to make an image. This image is magnified 5000 times to see the structures of the surface of an activated carbon grain. Just as carbon is used to filter water it can be used in waste treatment for power plants. Activated carbon is prepared from biomass that is rich in carbon - wood, nutshells, olive pits. This piece of activated carbon was prepared from nutshells by a research team looking at using biomass waste for energy production. It may have been the roughness and variation in the surface of the nutshell that caused the curious and surprising images we obtained using the electron microscope, including this one of a microsphere in perfect balance. Extremadura, Spain.