Jackass Penguins, wearing colorful ribbons, take a walk at the Hakkeijima Sea Paradise aquarium-amusement park complex in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo.
AP
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Illinois River silver carp jump out of the water after being disturbed by sounds of watercraft.
AP
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Giant panda mom Bai Yun plays with her roughhousing baby boy, Yun Zi, just like any parent. In addition to playing with mom, the cub crawled through bushes and worked on his tree-climbing skills, which included as much tumbling to the ground as it did climbing. Yun Zi is the fifth giant panda born at the San Diego Zoo.
AFP/Getty Images
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A pod of dolphins catch a wave at Cape Adieu, 99 miles west of Ceduna, Australia.
AP
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A young male Peregrine Falcon eats meat taken from the protective glove of Taronga Zoo bird trainer Erin Stone following a short flying lesson in Sydney. The young falcon has been receiving treatment and rehabilitation after being found with a broken wing in rural New South Wales and is now having flying lessons with the zoo’s expert keepers in readiness for its eventual return to the wild.
AFP/Getty Images
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Kittens seen, during an international cat exhibition in Minsk, Belarus.
AP
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A female coquerel’s sifaka and her baby perch on a tree limb at the Bronx Zoo’s “Madagascar!” exhibit in New York.
Julie Larsen Maher/WCS
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A brown male bear named Karamush tries to stay cool at a lake at Black sea town of Varna’s zoo, east of the Bulgarian capital Sofia.
AP
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Faith a two-legged dog walking down Michigan Ave to the wonderment of the human pedestrians.
AP
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A diver wearing a Santa Claus costume feeds a group of fish as a dolphin passes below at Hakkeijima Sea Paradise park complex in Yokohama.
EPA
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A brazilian Jaguar – Onça Pintada ( Panthera Onça) walks on its enclosure at the Itaipu Binacional power plant natural preserve in Foz do Iguaçu – Brazil.
Luiz C. Ribeiro
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Happy, a 28-year-old Nile at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington.
AP
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A group of Common Cranes gather in dawn light, on their night-roost on a lake in the German state of Brandenburg, close to Berlin. From September to November tens of thousands of Cranes use the rural area close to the German Capital for a stopover during their migration from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe to their wintering quarters in Spain.
REUTERS
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A male tiger is released into the waters of the river Harikhali at the Sundarbans delta forest, about 93 miles south of the eastern Indian city of Kolkata.
REUTERS
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A seal wears sunglasses during a solar eclipse event at Sunshine International Aquarium in Tokyo, Japan.
AP
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A hunting hawk chases a rabbit during an annual hunting competition in Chengelsy Gorge, some 93 miles east of Almaty. When it snows on the steppes of eastern Kazakhstan, hunters saddle up and gallop off with eagles on their arms in search of prey. Many in Kazakhstan see eagle hunting as a symbol of their nation’s nomadic past and a throwback to an oft-romanticised era before these steppes turned into a geopolitical battleground between competing regional powers Russia and China.
REUTERS
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Women stand with their Afghan Hound before going into the parade ring during the Crufts dog show in Birmingham, central England.
REUTERS
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An Afghan boy falls off his donkey as it fights with another outside the German armed forces Bundeswehr camp in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan.
REUTERS
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A polar bear shakes his body to remove water at the St. Felicien Wildlife Zoo in St. Felicien. According to Environment Canada, Canada is home of approximately 15,000 of the estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide. The species is also listed as a special concern by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada while last year, the U.S. listed the polar bear as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act because their sea ice habitat is melting down.
REUTERS
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A horse from the Kings Troop, the Royal Horse Artillery, swims in the sea near Blackpool, northern England. The regiment have brought the horses to the Lancashire seaside resort as a break from their usual ceremonial duties in London.
REUTERS
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Bengal Tiger Kingda Ka smashes pumpkins during Fall at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey. According to Six Flags’, Ka loves to swim as he dives down under the water line, across or to the bottom of the pool for the things he wants.
Reuters
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Kira, a 5-day-old baboon, gestures as it is fed by an employee of the Royev Ruchey Zoo in Russia’s Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. Kira’s mother refused to feed her cub and now it will be bottle fed.
REUTERS
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Watched by three hungry cubs the mother bear was demonstrating the skill of fishing to her young. Perched on the edge of a waterfall, she manages to keep her balance as the salmon unwittingly leap out of the water and into her menacing jaws. She may look like a graceful and loving mother but she’s also a vicious fighter — as one unfortunate bear found out when he tried to steal her cubs’ dinner.
Splash News
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Eight-time champ Jamie Mitchell was filming off the Northern New South Wales coast in September for a TV project when the whale surfaced right in front of his paddleboard. It was part of a pod of four whales that had been surfacing about 30 feet away from him. Jamie said: “I’ve seen pliots whales, sharks, dolphins, flying fish and all sorts of creatures. “But to see these whales so close and so personal … it was a once in a lifetime thing, something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”
Splash News
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A rare white tiger dramatically bursts out of the water at feeding time to fight for food.
Splash News
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A baby elephant is seen trapped in a manhole of a drainage ditch in Rayong province, eastern Thailand. The accident occurred when mahouts took the elephant to work on the street. Rescuers spent 3 hours freeing the animal, who was unharmed, by using a bulldozer to widen the hole.
AP
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An octopus wrapped around the shell of a coconut and using it to protect itself on the seabed floor. Australian scientists on December 15 revealed that the eight-tentacled species can carry coconut shells to use as armour — the first case of an invertebrate using tools.
AFP/Getty Images
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Taronga’s elephant calf, Luk Chai, sitting on a large ball. The calf has also been seen swimming at the zoo with Taronga elephant keeper Lucy Melo, saying that four-month-old Luk Chai “had learned really quickly not to get out of his depth in the water. He goes into the moat at the end near the elephants barn, which has steps making it easy for him to control how deep he gets”
AFP/Getty Images
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Seals play at a seal-breeding station in Norddeich, northern Germany. For the last 22 years, seal minder Fritz Rabenstein raises abandoned seal puppies at the station before returning them later into the wild.
AFP/Getty Images
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A newborn Beluga whale swimming alongside its mother Puiji at The John G. Shedd Aquarium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to public education and conservation, is one of the world’s largest indoor aquariums.
AFP/Getty Images
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Palestinian men tape a donkey in order to paint it to look like a zebra ahead of the Eid al-Adha festival, at the Marah Land Zoo in eastern Gaza City. The zoo cannot afford to buy a zebra which can be very expensive to buy.
AP
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A tiger cub licks his paws next to a snoozing pig at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo, Sriracha, near Pattaya east of Bangkok, Thailand.
EPA
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Irish jockey G. Gallagher (foreground, right) is separated from his mount De Luain Gorm at the famous ‘The Chair’ obstacle during the John Smith’s Fox Hunters’ Steeplechase in Liverpool, north west England.
EPA
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Three new born brown bears enjoy an outing in the sunshine in the Attica Zoological Park, on the outskirts of Athens, Greece.
EPA
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Jellyfish illuminated with colored lights are seen inside a tank at the Blue Zoo in Beijing. The “Blue Zoo,” a 20 million euro Sino-New Zealand joint venture, is Beijing’s largest and most popular aquarium. Equipped with a 130-meter-long moving walkway swirling through an underwater tunnel the aquarium hosts a large variety of exotic fish.
EPA
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The eyes of an American Alligator, Alligator mississippiensis specie, captured at Alligator Action Farm in Friedberg, Germany.
EPA
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Three little pigs, only a couple of days old, have a nap at the zoo in Langenwolmsdorf near Stolpen, Saxony, eastern Germany.
EPA
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A rabbit stands still in Okunoshima Island, off Takehara city in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan.
EPA
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A “nocturnal monkey,” called Marteja, feeds its baby monkey at the Santa Fe Zoo in Medellin, Colombia. The cub is the first to be born in captivity after almost 10 years of reproduction attempts. The night monkey is an endangered species that inhabits the tropical rainforest.
EPA
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French Bulldog “Bully” takes a swim in the toddler pool of the swimming bath “Mirandabad” in Amsterdam.
EPA
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A German veterinarian gives a pedicure to Boy, a 39 year-old Asian elephant, who was sedated before the cosmetic work at Kiev Zoo. A delegation of German veterinarians arrived from Munich Zoo to help their Ukrainian colleagues perform the complex pedicure.
AFP/Getty Images
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A critically endangered Northwest African or Saharan cheetah is seen in a photograph taken as part of the first systematic camera trap survey across the central Sahara, covering an area of 2,800 km². The survey identified four different Saharan cheetahs using spot patterns unique to each individual.
REUTERS
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Horses run around a marker during their tideland race in Duhnen, Lower Saxony, Germany . About 150 horses are taking part in the various races across a coastal tidal area, watched by some 30,000 spectators.
AP Photo
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A sparrow drinks from a leaky water pipe on a hot summer day in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality.
AP Photo
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Bulkee, a koala from ZooParc Beauval in France, munches leaves at the the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
AP
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Siberian Tiger Tinka, plays in the snow at the zoo in Servion near Lausanne, Switzerland.
AP
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A lynx walks in the snow at the zoo of Servion near Lausanne, Switzerland.
EPA
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Zingfu, a white Bengal tiger, shows his teeth after a show at Big Cat Habitat and Gulf Coast Sanctuary.
AP
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A Japanese Macaque (Snow Monkey) soaks in a hot spring in Yamanouchi town, central Japan.
REUTERS
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Sheep lie in a snowcovered meadow, in the region of The Hague.
AFP/Getty Images
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Grappling hand to fin with a 12-foot tiger shark free diver Craig Clasen got a little more than he bargained for during a spear fishing expedition in the Gulf of Mexico. Clasen spent nearly two hours wrestling with the giant shark, spearing it seven times and even attempting to drown the beast before eventually finishing it off with a long blade knife. Clasen, who had spent four days spear fishing yellow finned tuna and mahoo in the Mississippi River mouth, off the coast of Louisiana, killed the shark after the predator started to circle and act aggressively toward filmmaker Ryan McInnis.
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