The year's best wildlife photos reveal a super-chill monkey, a rare Siberian tiger, and an ant clinging to a beetle's leg

Blanco said he often hears stonechat birds outside his home in Andalucia, Spain. So when he saw them flitting about in a nearby meadow, he asked his father if they could return in the family car.

Blanco knelt on the car's backseat and pointed his camera out the open window, training his lens on a single male stonechat. Blanco's shot of the bird's balancing act won the contest's 10-and-under age division.

Heikkinen and her father spent a day in July watching a family of foxes on the island of Lehtisaari in Finland. At 7 p.m., the mom brought home a goose. Her cubs fought over it, sending feathers flying. A single cub emerged victorious.

After urinating on its prize, the winning cub dragged the carcass into a crevice and started chomping. Its snarling expression was a warning to its siblings: Don't you dare steal this goose back.

Alberto Fantoni photographed the birds on the edge of a cliff in Sardinia, along the Mediterranean coast. A migratory species, these falcons feed on insects and other migrant birds.

Great crested grebes hold their chicks nestled in their backs for two to three weeks after they're born to keep them safe from predators. The chicks, appropriately called backlings, require lots of food to grow.

This photo, taken by Jose Luis Ruiz Jiménez, shows one parent emerging from an underwater fishing expedition as the chicks reach to grab the morsel.

Normally, red-banded sand wasps and cuckoo wasps don't interact. But by taking pictures on an extremely fast shutter speed, Deschandol captured both wasps in exquisite detail as they entered their neighboring nest holes at the same time.

Cai photographed the squid as it hunted off the coast of Anilao, in the Philippines. Diamondback squids are mostly transparent, but their skin cells contain pigment that reflect and scatter light, making them appear iridescent.

The nest belongs to Cordilleran flycatchers; the mom is tending to her 12-day-old hatchlings.

Pallas' cats are a solitary, rarely seen species that resides at high altitudes in northern China. Through his research, Li determined that he would get his best photo of them in August or September, the time of year when kittens are a few months old.

His shot shows the kittens right after their mother warned them of a Tibetan fox lurking close by. Some look confused; others have already started running home.

Normally vibrant and social creatures, pig-tailed macaques are increasingly under threat. They live in forests throughout Southeast Asia, but when palm oil companies and other groups destroy these forests, that leads the primates to raid farms, where they get shot as pests. Their babies are often sold illegally at markets like the one in Bali shown above.

Photographer Paul Hilton told a trader that he was interested in buying a macaque in order to get into a back room at a market, where he captured the monkey's downcast expression.

The bear shown above been performing for 18 years, ever since she was captured from an Arctic island at the age of two. In this image, taken by Kirsten Luce, the bear stands on her hind legs, her jaw sealed in a wire muzzle.

Photographer Jaime Culebras took this picture of the frog clinging to a branch in the heavy rain, its webbed feet splayed as it snacks on a spider. The shot is the first ever of a Manduriaci glass frog eating. Culebras found the creature on a small, private reserve in northwestern Ecuador, the only region where the species has been found.

The young monkey's serene expression is "quite unlike anything I've ever seen on another monkey," photographer Mogens Trolle said.

Found only on the island of Borneo and a few islands nearby, the proboscis monkey is named for the males' huge noses, which they use to attract mates and signal status. They're hunted for their bezoar stones: lumps of intestinal secretions used in Chinese medicine.

The 'tongue-eating louse' swims through the clownfish's gills, then hitches itself to the base of the fish's tongue. Once the tongue is gone, the parasite burrows into the fish's mouth for good. For the rest of their lives, the clownfish and the parasite then depend upon each other. The louse feeds off the fish's blood and mucus, and the fish uses the louse as its new tongue. Teenage photographer Sam Sloss captured this image.

The beetles secrete cyanide and can barrel quickly toward their prey.

In the scene shown in photographer Ripan Biswas's image, this beetle had already snapped the ant in two with its clicking mandibles. But the ant's head and upper body remained firmly attached.

"The beetle kept pulling at the ant's leg, trying to rid itself of the ant's grip, but it couldn't quite reach its head," Biswas said.

Photographer Gabriel Eisenband found the flowers by accident while on a trip to take pictures of the mountain behind them: Ritak'Uwa Blanco, the highest peak in the Eastern Cordillera of the Colombian Andes.

But the tufts of white arnica caught Eisenband's attention. A member of the daisy family, these plants contain proteins in their leaves that keep them from freezing in extreme cold.

Mount Etna sits between the African and Eurasian continental plates and has been erupting continuously for 30 years.

In this photo, taken by Luciano Gaudenzio in 2017, a gash on the mountain's southern flank spews lava. The molten river looked like "an open wound on the rough and wrinkled skin of a huge dinosaur," Gaudenzio said.