The best wildlife photos taken this year reveal a pair of puffins, fighting foxes, and a perfectly camouflaged hippo

UK photographer Matthew Maran snapped this shot of a young fox attempting to get her prize, a dead brown rat, away from her brother. Another fox vied for the rat too, he said, resulting in a three-way tug-of-war. It's likely, Maran said, that these youngsters' parents either gave them the rat, or they found it dead. 

Foxes scavenge for everything from discarded food to birdseed in abandoned lots in northern London. When they're lucky, they find mice, voles, and even worms.

Alaska's Katmai National Park is home to about 2,200 brown bears. When these bears, which are among the world's largest, awake from hibernation in the spring, they feast on sockeye salmon.

Males can eat up to 30 salmon per day and weigh more than 1,000 pounds by the end of the summer. 

Photographer Makoto Ando spent three hours watching this owl couple in a frozen forest in Hokkaido, Japan.

Then, a red squirrel appeared — one of the owls' favorite treats. The squirrel curiously peered into the owls' hole before making a quick getaway.

"'I thought it was going to be caught right in front of me, but the owls just stared back," Ando said.

The marsupials, likely accustomed to being fed by campers, posed nicely for photographer Gary Meredith.

Come evening, the mother (left) and her joey squeezed out of shower and scampered up trees in the park to eat peppermint leaves.

This egg smorgasbord lasted for over an hour, Culebras said. The arachnid slowly pierced each egg, injected her digestive juices to liquify the prey inside, then sucked out the innards.

There are 11 species of wandering spiders, all of which hunt in the central American rainforest by night, typically preying on frogs.

Puffin populations are in decline around the world because sand eels are becoming harder to come by, mostly due to warming waters and more frequent storms in the Atlantic.   

Teenage photographer Evie Easterbrook captured these puffins on camera near their nest in the UK's Farne Islands. 

Puffins pairs tend to mate for life and return to the same burrow each season, sharing egg-incubating and parenting duties. When it's time to breed, the puffins plumage shifts from dull grey to the more brightly coloured visages shown here.

Photographer Jose Fragozo waited in his vehicle for the tell-tale blink of an eye that signaled a hippo was emerging from under the mud to take a breath.

This particular mud patch is part of the dried-up Mara River in Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve. The area has been stricken by drought. Hippos can survive the water's disappearance, but most aquatic life can't. 

There were once more than 20,000 gharials in southeast Asia. But fishermen hunted them for their skin and collected and their eggs, and river habitats dried up as people built dams and irrigation canals. Now, only an estimated 650 adults remain. About 500 of them live in a sanctuary, according to photographer Dhiritiman Mukherjee.

Mukherjee saw particular gharial, a 13-foot-long male, buoying his offspring in the National Chambal Sanctuary in Uttar Pradesh, India.

Topshells were once the world's most traded invertebrate.

But conservation efforts are helping them to rebound, and ensuring that topshells like these can survive among the coral of remote French Polynesia. That's where photographer Laurent Ballesta captured this photo, which also shows a grey reef shark searching for its next fishy meal.

The photo shows dead shy albatross, white‑chinned petrels, and a yellow-nosed albatross that wound up as fishermen's bycatch off the South African coast.

A boat's fishing line can extend for more than 50 miles, dotted with thousands of baited hooks. Seabirds trying to snag fish off the baited line can hook themselves and drown.

But far fewer seabirds now wind up as bycatch in South Africa than they once did, thanks to more seabird‑friendly fishing practices like the use of weighted hooks that sink better. That's reduced the number of birds killed as bycatch in South Africa from the tens of thousands to mere hundreds per year.

More than 300,000 seabirds are killed this way every year around the world, however.

In the markets of Sulawesi, Indonesia, traders sell fruit bats, pythons, and bushrats for food.

Local hunters and traders bring wild mammals and reptiles, along with domestic cats and dogs, to the Tomohon Market, pictured above.

Photographer Quentin Martinez said he saw live, wild animals tied by ropes or piled in cages, waiting to be butchered.

This area, known as the Alberta tar sands, was once a vast forest. Now the landscape is a section of the Mildred Lake Tar Mine, part of the world's third-largest oil reserve.

In this image from photographer Garth Lenz, a huge mining pit is surrounded by waste ponds containing the toxic byproducts of the mining process. 

Mining and extracting the oil from sand and clay produces nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides that pollute air and waterways.

Loggers and cattle ranchers illegally start fires to clear areas of the Amazon rainforest, many of which belong to indigenous tribes, for agriculture and cattle farming.

Charlie Hamilton James has photographed deforestation in the Amazon for the past decade. He called the single tree in this photo "a monument to human stupidity."