Marine creatures that inhabit the Lembeh Strait at the edge of the Molucca Sea, in Indonesia.
In a recent 2019 study (doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2019.0183), researchers from the University of Bristol discovered that orange fur is actually good camouflage in the wild. This is because most mammals are dichromats, meaning that they only have two colour receptors in their retina, and this makes them unable to distinguish red from green. In other words, most mammals see green instead of orange, which makes orange fur blend pretty well with the surrounding greenery.
It turns out that since no mammal has managed to develop green fur, orange fur is actually the next best-thing, as far as camouflage is concerned. Humans however are trichomats, and unlike most other mammals can pick out the orange colour with ease.
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A murmuration of common starlings flying at sunset, at Gretna Green (a parish within Dumfries and Galloway), Scotland.
The great blue heron is a large wading bird, common near the shores of open water and in wetlands over most of North and Central America, as well as far northwestern South America, the Caribbean and the Galápagos Islands. It is occasionally found in the Azores and is a rare vagrant to Europe. An all-white population found in south Florida and the Florida Keys is known as the great white egret. Debate exists about whether these white birds are simply a colour morph (i.e. differing only in appearance, but belonging to the same species) of the great blue heron, a subspecies of it, or an entirely separate species.
The great blue herons shown here are from the Wakodahatchee Wetlands, in Delray Beach, Florida.
Weaver birds, so named for their elaborately woven nests, from Uganda and India. Weaver birds are seed-eating birds with rounded conical bills.
Beech trees and wild anemones blooms heralding the arrival of spring, in Jutland, Denmark (© Nick Brundle).
Kingfishers in Croatia catch little fish during the harsh winter, when the lake is almost completely frozen and covered with ice © Petar Sabol.
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