The week in wildlife

Week in wildlife in pictures: a penguin ballerina, the spooky spookfish and a sociable octopus

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Dancing on ice … A Modern Dancer, Antarctica by Nadia Haq, which won gold in the Comedy Bird Photo category of the 2024 Bird Photographer of the Year awards. Haq said: “I was sitting on a Zodiac next to my husband and 10-year-old son near Brown Bluff, Antarctica, when we spotted a group of Adélie penguins on some sea ice. As we slowly approached them, they started to toboggan on the ice, and I captured one of them sliding as if performing a modern dance move.” See more images in our gallery

Photograph: Nadia Haq/Bird Photographer of the Year

A deer stag barks as the annual rutting season begins in Richmond Park, London, UK

Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Welcome back to the Moorean viviparous tree snail, which was thought to be extinct in the wild but has been rediscovered in French Polynesia for the first time in 40 years. Teams from the Zoological Society of London and zoos worldwide have been working for decades to reintroduce extinct and endangered snails to the archipelago. This little fellow was unmarked, meaning the previously reintroduced snails have been breeding there. It is the very first invertebrate species to have been reintroduced successfully after having been completely extinct in the wild

Photograph: HNP Newsdesk/Hyde News & Pictures Ltd

A squirrel stands alert with a nut in its mouth among autumn colours on fallen foliage in Dublin, Ireland. Let’s hope it remembers where it buries it

Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

Gannets at their most dramatic diving into the Atlantic Ocean off the uninhabited Isle of Noss in the Shetlands. The birds can reach speeds of 100 km/h as they hit the water

Photograph: mediadrumimages/Brian Matthews

A one-horned rhinoceros and its calf graze in Pobitora wildlife sanctuary on the outskirts of Guwahati, India

Photograph: Anupam Nath/AP

A new species of ghost shark, with an unusually long nose and a whip-like tail, has been discovered in the inky depths of New Zealand waters. The narrow-nosed spookfish, as it has been christened, is typically found at great ocean depths – up to 2,600 metres – and little is known about it. It can grow to about a metre long, but it’s no Jaws: it mainly eats shrimp and molluscs

Photograph: NIWA

A snake slithers along a hiking path in the Bloedel nature reserve, near Seattle, Washington, US

Photograph: Bruce Chambers/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Dream team … a big blue octopus (its actual name, although it changes colour) hunts with two collaborators. New research has shown that octopuses, who are usually considered to be solitary creatures, sometimes team up with fish to hunt. Here, a blue goatfish (purple and yellow, on the left) acts as a scout, going ahead to scan for prey. A blacktip grouper (brown and white, centre) acts as the rearguard. ‘Nobody really knew that octopus have this sophisticated social life – not with other octopus, but with other species,’ said study co-author Iain Couzin

Photograph: Eduardo Sampaio/PA

A spotted redshank looks for fish in wetlands near Bursa, Turkey, on its annual migration south

Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

A bilby – known as ‘Australia’s answer to the Easter bunny’ – is released into Sturt national park, in the far north-west of New South Wales, Australia. Seven locally extinct mammals are being reintroduced there as part of the Wild Desert project, which aims to return the area’s arid ecosystem to its precolonial state of biodiversity. Quolls, bettongs, bandicoots and mulgara are now thriving there

Photograph: Richard Freeman/Wild Deserts/UNSW

A dragonfly shows off its five eyes (two compound, three simple) in Assam, India

Photograph: Anuwar Hazarika/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

Southern right whales swim in the Atlantic off Puerto Madryn, Argentina

Photograph: Maxi Jonas/Avalon

An American goldfinch takes a bath in a garden fountain in Placentia (near LA), California, US

Photograph: Bruce Chambers/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

A Hermann’s tortoise explores the ruins of Gorica castle in Berat, Albania

Photograph: Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

Tongue-lashing … a komodo dragon up close on Komodo Island, Indonesia. The reptile smells with its tongue and can detect carrion from up to six miles away

Photograph: Leighton Lum/Caters News

Stark before-and-after photographs reveal the sharp decline of Norway’s seabirds. The left picture shows a nesting area on Hornøya, a small, uninhabited island at the far north-eastern tip of the country, in 2006; the right shows it in 2023. Seabirds are ‘one of the bird groups that have done most poorly when you look globally,’ says Signe Christensen-Dalsgaard, an ecologist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. ‘It’s a quite strong signal that something is not right in the ocean’

Photograph: Rob Barrett and Signe Christensen-Dalsgaard/Rob Barrett

A school of leerfish in İzmir, Turkey

Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

A bee considers the nectar potential of a flower at a park in Seoul, South Korea

Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters