Waterworld

Ours.

Photo cropped for emphasis from the one at the via.

Army ant bivouac

"At dusk, Kronauer tracked the colony of nomadic army ants as it moved, travelling up to a quarter of a mile through the rainforest near La Selva biological station, in north-eastern Costa Rica. The ants would use their bodies to build a new daytime nest to house the queen and larvae. They would form a scaffold of vertical chains by interlocking claws on their feet and then create a network of chambers and tunnels into which the larvae and queen would be moved from the last bivouac."

Photo credit: Daniel Kronauer, from the 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year winners.

Camouflage

Find the leopard before he finds you.

Canine frisbee

Via the oddlysatisfying subreddit.

Saying goodbye to cameras

And note the different vertical scales for the two datasets.  Via.

Posted because I'm in the process of deciding what to do with my old hiking companion of the 1970s - a Minolta XE-7 with 28-80 wide-angle to zoom macro lens, plus a padded holster, extension tubes, and assorted filters and accessories.  I enjoyed a couple decades of wildflower and nature photography, but now practicality trumps sentiment.  Really sorry to see this stuff go (if I can find a place for it to go).

Blue lava

One of the hydrothermal sites at Dollol (Ethiopia).  The burning of sulfur generates a characteristic blue flame.  Credit Olivier Grunewald.

Subterranean junkyard

Explained at Wired:

The Gaewern Slate Mine in Ceredigion, Wales, was once rich in slate, a purplish-gray rock sought for its beauty and durability. It was extracted between 1812 and 1960. But once humans had emptied the mine of everything they wanted, they filled it with everything they didn't: broken washing machines, shot microwaves, and dozens of rusty old cars...

None were so tricky to photograph as the Gaewern mine, though. To reach it, Friend and a companion drove seven hours from London, then hiked down a precariously narrow ledge hugging a cliff face to the entrance. Inside, they rappelled five stories down—a huge tripod, large format camera, and other equipment on their backs—then crept 20 feet through a low, claustro­phobic tunnel that opened to the cavern you see above.

Friend was most struck by the almost religious shaft of light pouring in through a crack in the rock above. Capturing that light, while properly illuminating the rest of the scene, required keeping his camera's aperture open for a full five minutes. During the first minute of the exposure, he used a powerful flashlight to trace the darker objects he wanted to highlight. Then he switched it off and let the natural light accumulate on the film for the remainder of the shot.

An impressive image - and a reminder that there is no "away."

Addendum:  Video here.

Find the sniper and the snow leopard

There are more such photos at the Find The Sniper subreddit.

Photo credits for these two to Saurabh Desai and via.

The "Gates of Heaven" don't look like this

Tourists visiting Bali have been "shocked" to discover that the reflecting pool effect is created at the site by the strategic placement of a mirror in front of the camera, and that one needs to wait in line for hours to use the mirror.  Details at the New York Post.

The truck is not completely invisible - updated

You can see the tire.  And the door handle.  Discussion thread.

Here's another one:

Via.

It has its mother's eyes. And its father's...

Commonly known as a "water tiger," this four-eyed micro-AT-AT is the larval form of a predaceous diving beetle.

Via for the colorized scanning EM, whence the quote I used for the title; too bad the critter was wrongly identified there.  A major tip of the blogging hat to reader "unknown," who found the correct attribution for the image.

Visible birdsong

Photo credit: Михаил Калинин

You think this is funny?

Photos of Great White Sharks, viewed "upside down" from underneath.

Oasis

The Alma Oasis near Ubari, Libya.  Photo (presumably oversaturated, but striking just for morphology) via.

Saiga antelope

One of the endangered animals photographed by Tim Flach in this remarkable gallery.

Harpy eagle

Photo via.

Caption contest

Via ReplacesandcancelsthepreviousJohnnythehorse.

Night scene in the Atacama

NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day:

It can be the driest place on planet Earth, but water still flows in Chile's Atacama desert, high in the mountains. After discovering this small creek with running water, the photographer returned to the site to watch the Milky Way rise in the dark southern skies, calculating the moment when Milky Way and precious flowing water would meet. In the panoramic night skyscape, stars and nebulae immersed in the glow along the Milky Way itself also shared that moment with the Milky Way's satellite galaxies the Large and Small Magellanic clouds above the horizon at the right. Bright star Beta Centauri is poised at the very top of the waterfall. Above it lies the dark expanse of the Coalsack nebula and the stars of the Southern Cross.

Award-winning travel photography

The Guardian has posted a gallery of about a dozen winning entries in their annual travel photography competition.  This was the winner in the "single image, faces, people, or culture" category.

Kibish, Ethiopia: A boy from the Suri tribe, who live in Ethiopia’s Omo valley, with women from the tribe in their long copper bracelets.  Photograph: Danny Ye Sin Wong/TPOTY

This is a natural "rainbow swamp"

If I saw something like this in the woods, I would assume that some idiot had dumped old oilcans in the pond.  Nope.  It's a natural phenomenon.

Years ago, when I was leading swamp walks at Clyde Butcher’s Big Cypress Gallery, I noticed what looked like an oil slick on the surface of the water. One of the swamp walk leaders with much more experience, Jeff Ripple, explained that the natural oils from the cypress cones disbursed once they dropped in the water.

Top photo via the Pics subreddit.  The quoted text and the photo below are from Florida Hikes.