Every year, The Kennel Club has a competition for best 'Dog Photographer of the Year'. and the photographs this year are more stunning and more heartfelt than ever!
Shared below are the winners of multiple categories!
Story via The Insider
amazing
Are you ready to be completely hypnotized by these green-eyed beauties?!
We have so many questions... and absolutely no answers.
Via Nature on PBS
And it's absolutely mesmerizing!
"Do octopuses dream?" According to Nature on PBS, the brilliant change of color might be an indicator that the sleeping octopus is in fact dreaming.
"If she is dreaming, this is a dramatic moment," said Dr Scheel, a marine biologist narrating the clip from an upcoming PBS nature documentary.
"She sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit, then she turns all dark, octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom (of the ocean)."
"This is a camouflage," Dr. Scheel continues, "like she's just subdued a crab and now she's going to sit there and eat it and she doesn't want anyone to notice her."
"To see the color come and go on her mantle like that, just to be able to see all the different color patterns flashing one after the other, you don't normally see that when an animal's sleeping."
It truly is a spectacular sight.
Amalie Markota Andersen has taught her pet rat, Darius, to do something quite extraordinary -- paint! Anderson herself is an animation and digital arts student and told The Insider that it only took Darius roughly 10 minutes to complete a masterpiece.
Darius used his feet to create his work and his painting have gone viral multiple times on Twitter and Tumblr. He's sold about 3 or 4 pieces.
Unfortunately, the talented Darius passed away earlier in 2019. Anderson says her and Darius had a special bond and we're 100% sure of that.
Darius and his paintings have been going viral on the internet since this past Saturday, when pictures of him and his work were shared by a now-private account.
Story via The Insider
Now your pet can truly be royalty! Crown & Paw specializing in custom pet portraits with an interesting and fancy twist. All paintings look like rare and authentic 19th-century oil paintings! You can now have a Renaissance-era painting of your pet! And the results are majesty and hilarious all rolled into one.
Truly the perfect painting.
And she did! The love we have for our pets can sometimes astound us!
Meet Carole King of Deer Park, Washington, who lost her beloved 7-year-old border collie named Katie.
It happened on July 20th, when Carole, her husband, and Katie, traveled to Flathead County for a four-day getaway. The couple had gone out to dinner and left Katie in their hotel room, and when they returned Katie was nowhere to be found.
King told the Daily Inter Lake that she was devastated and sick to her stomach. She frantically searched her room for her Katie, looking for any signs of her beloved canine before rushing to the front desk in hopes Katie was still somewhere in the building.
King said, "I said to the clerk, 'please tell me you have my dog.' The clerk says 'no, she left about 4, 4 1/2 hours ago,' "
Unfortunately, the moment those automatic doors opened, Katie ran out without a trace.
The devastated couple spent days that soon turned into weeks looking for Katie.
Carole King worked as a postal worker but quit in order to continue her search and dedicate all her time to it.
The news about Katie was beginning to spread online and in doing so, multiple Facebook pages popped up, filled with users who were offering words of encouragement and sharing and information about recent sightings that could help bring Katie home.
King hung up 500 flyers around the county, searching into the night and gone as far as setting up a few game cameras in spots where Katie had been spotted.
"I never gave up. I never lost hope," said King.
On September 15th, 57 days later, King got a call in the early morning from a man in the Country Estates neighborhood. He told her there was a dog in his backyard that matched the description of Katie. It just so happened that the day before the call, King and a friend were in that very neighborhood posting flyers around.
King called up that same friend for help as they rushed out to find Katie but by the time they arrived, the dog was already gone.
The pair decided to search the neighborhood again with no luck in sight. As they decide to return back home, a woman called out to King, "As the lady was walking back, she points over to the tree where it's real dark and says, 'Is that your dog?'" King said. "And I turn and it's Katie."
Heart skipping a beat and beyond excited, King called out to her beloved dog, "Katie. Katie girl!"
Katie came running over.
"I just bear-hugged her; I wasn't going to let her go," King recalled. "Tears were flying, we were screaming, everybody is high-fiving, hugging each other. People are stopping in their vehicles, getting out and hugging us. I think the whole neighborhood knew that we found her."
Immediately from there, King took Katie to a local emergency vet clinic where King learned that she had lost 12 pounds, was severely dehydrated and in starvation mode.
Even though Katie was skin and bones, she is in good spirits and expected to make a full recovery.
Congratulations to the King's who never gave up hope! Katie is lucky to have you!
Story via Daily Inter Lake
Meet Young-sung Kim, the extraordinary artist from Seoul, Korea, that is about to take your senses on a magic ride! Kim creates insane hyperrealistic pictures that look way too real for the mind to even comprehend that it's just a painting!
His paintings, oil on canvas, look more realistic than actual photographs!
The Insider interviewed Kim on his process of what he calls, "an advanced, extreme hyperrealism that precedes any reality — more real than photographs and high-definition monitors."
He continued describing the process and how planning each new piece involves, "collecting small animals, taking photographs, preparing a canvas, sketching, drawing, and painting with small brushes."
Kim also informed the Insider that he works 12 hours per day on creating these masterpieces.It can take anywhere from 3 to 10 months to complete one painting.
Since Kim was a small child, he's been "collecting, observing, and studying .. I was amazed at the detail and the subtle colors that I saw in my work, just as I looked through a microscope."
Why hyperrealism? Kim explains, "I have chosen my genre as hyperrealism because people in today's society think of animals and nature as methods of ornament, experiment, and edibility, My genre may be able to make the people think twice about the unintentionally abusive nature of their behavior towards animals and nature."
"Let's take care of small animals," Kim said. "If they cannot live, humans cannot live either."
We completely agree, Kim! Keep creating and loving life!
Via The Insider
The finalists of the 2019 AGORA Awards have been selected, after 130,000 submissions! And they are all spectacular! The winner will be announced November 6th, and win the title of 'world's greatest photo' along with a whooping $25,000!
Any while all the selections are breathtaking, we've simply only collected the animal pics. For the complete selection, head over to the AGORA Awards site.
Via AGORA Images
Via Beastly
Wow! Meet Lynea Lattanzio, founder of the Cat House On The Kings, California's largest no-cage, no-kill sanctuary for feral and abandoned cats and kittens. She is the woman who gave up her five-bedroom house, her luxurious cars and retirement fund in order to live and care for 1,000 felines.
Yup, you heard that right.
Her sanctuary, 'Cat House On The Kings,' currently homes roughly 700 adults and 350 kittens. In 2003, the sanctuary achieved non-profit status and was able to begin soliciting donations, but initially finances depended heavily on Lynea herself. Lynea spent her retirement funds and sold her Mercedes, her Cadillac and her two-carat diamond wedding ring, in order to stay a float.
An extremely rare spotted zebra was spotted (no pun intended) in Maasai Mara! A photographer at the Maasai Mara camp was completely surprised to come across the rare "blacker" newly born zebra. Mr Antony Tira, a renowned tour guide at the camp was able to photograph the black-dotted foal and posted it on the camp's Facebook page, where it has gained a lot of media attention.
Tira told Nation, "At first I thought it was a zebra that had been captured and painted or marked for purposes of migration. I was confused when I first saw it." Upon closer inspection, Tira realized it was actually a zebra with melanin disorder, hardly a week old.
This is Mara's first record case of such a rare zebra.
Story via Nation
An incredible 138 seal pups were recorded in the pup-count in 2018! River Thames, a river in London, was declared "biologically dead" 60 years ago and is now clear evidence of a harbor seal breeding ground! Thea Cox, Conservation Biologist, told ZSL, "We were thrilled to count 138 pups born in a single season. The seals would not be able to pup here at all without a reliable food source, so this demonstrates that the Thames ecosystem is thriving and shows just how far we have come since the river was declared biologically dead in the 1950's."
Anna Cucknell, Project Manager of the ZSL's Thames conservation added, "The restored 'Mother Thames' - as we call her - is an essential nursery habitat and home to many animals including more than 100 species of fish, including two species of shark, short-snouted seahorses and the Critically Endangered European eel.
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Incredibly, harbour seal pups can swim within hours of birth which means they are well adapted to grow up in tidal estuaries, like the Thames. By the time the tide comes in they can swim away on it. Grey seals, on the other hand, take longer to be comfortable in the water, so breed elsewhere and come to the Thames later to feed."
The seal numbers in Thames are rising and Thames has now become one of London's most important wildlife habitats!
Story via ZSL
Sometimes, life...finds a way. Cue the Jurassic Park theme song
In all seriousness, this is really incredible. All these animals were so very close to extinction but overcame the odds and now are thriving! Just the kind of uplifting news we need in this world.
Learn more about each species below (commentary by MentalFloss):
Bats are widely misunderstood creatures in the animal kingdom - while they're associated with witches, vampires and darkness in general, they're actually super cute and interesting. And scientists have just discovered something amazing about them - bats use leaves as "mirrors" that reflect sound waves, helping them find insects hiding behind leaves. Cool, right? Or confusing? Keep on reading, we'll explain everything.
