The stunning winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition

Poachers killed this black rhino bull and hacked off its horns. The photo by Brent Stirton was taken in a nature reserve in South Africa. The jury felt that the image documents the horrific crimes humans commit against nature, and named it the winner of this year's competition.

Caco, a gorilla in the Odzala National Park in the Republic of Congo, is living the good life. Daniel Nelson's image was the winner of the competition's youth prize. The jury appreciated the irony in the similarities it reveals between wild apes and humans. The 100 most creative, original and technically brilliant photographs are on display in London's Natural History Museum.

A savannah in Brazil is aglow with thousands of bioluminescent click beetle larvae below a starry sky. Photographer Marcio Cabral captured this image in Emas National Park after a rain shower, when the tiny glowing worms began climbing a termite mound – much to the delight of a giant anteater. Bom apetite!

This entry from nature photographer and author Laurent Ballesta is special in many ways, not just its technical brilliance. No one has dived deeper under Antarctica's ice shelves than him. He brings back to the surface spectacular images documenting underwater worlds now endangered by global warming. This image is made up of a total 147 photographs.

Lobster larvae are food for all kinds of fish. But in this nighttime image taken near Tahiti, Anthony Berberian captures the moment when the prey becomes the hunter. With his unique aesthetic highlighting the beauty of this 12-millimeter-long deep-sea creature, the Frenchman won the prize for best underwater photograph.

Creep carefully over the snow, take a deep breath, and then dive in. That's how you hunt for prey in winter. This female red fox isn't just in it up to her neck, she crawled in all the way under the snow in Yellowstone National Park in the US. At the awards ceremony, 13-year-old photographer Ashleigh Scully from New Jersey revealed that her subject eventually came up empty-jawed.

No color, but this photo by Eilo Elvinger is striking in its contrasts and the way it captures the shimmering ice crystals on the bears' fur. And that makes it the winner of the award for best black and white photo. Not shown: the bodies of the polar bear mother and her two-year-old cub.

At the age of just five, Ekaterina Bee is fascinated with nature. And that fascination is mirrored in the way these two seagulls are looking at her and her family during a boat trip in Flatanger, Norway. She told the jury that the gulls looked curious, as if they were trying to understand what was happening on the boat. Her photo won in the "10 years and under" category.

Seemingly in a daydream, this chimpanzee lies on the ground in the forest of the Kibale National Park in Uganda. Photographer Peter Delaney said the chimp had been trying in vain to win the affection of a female. Maybe he's dreaming about what might have been. The image was named the winner in the Animal Portraits category.

This image by Aaron Gekoski is a potent reminder of the effects of palm oil production in Indonesia. Three generations of an elephant family walk a narrow path along a plantation being cleared for replanting. The elephants' natural habitat has been destroyed, and they're being pushed into smaller and smaller pockets of forest.

Photographer Tony Wu captured this moment during a dive in Sri Lanka amid dozens of sperm whales. As he observed, the mammals don't just communicate via sound, they also touch each other in this type of social gathering. There's been a ban on sperm whale hunting since 1986, but their numbers haven't recovered, keeping them on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

A Maori octopus marvels at the buffet before him, in the form of hundreds of giant spider crabs. Photographer Justin Gilligan was equally impressed by the bounty, taking this shot in the Pacific Ocean near Maria Island, Tasmania.