Week in Wildlife part 2

A bumblebee collects pollen from a dog rose in Germany. Bumblebees transport the pollen with the aid of hairs on their legs and use it to feed their young.

From tiny coral polyps grew a marvel: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

“Reefs for me are places for solitude and thought,” says Australian marine scientist Charlie Veron, here admiring a garden of stony corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef. “But I know there is fragility in their existence. I fear what lies ahead.”

From urban red-tailed hawks to mysterious humpback whales, via sunbathing turtles, here are the week’s finest images from the natural world

A butterfly sits on a flower in a garden in Dhulikhel near Kathmandu, Nepal

Conservation International is celebrating 20 years of its rapid assessment programme, which sends field scientists into remote habitats and has discovered more than 1,300 new species. To mark the anniversary, the organisation has named the top 20 ‘stars’ of the programme’s history, that scientists say are ‘some of the most biologically surprising, unique, or threatened discoveries’

Uroplatus phantasticus, the satanic leaf-tailed gecko, was observed on an RAP survey in the Mantadia-Zahamena corridor of Madagascar in 1998. This gecko is the smallest of 12 species of bizarre-looking leaf-tailed geckos that are nocturnal, arboreal and endemic to Madagascar. They are only found in primary, undisturbed forests, so their populations are very sensitive to habitat destruction. In 2004, WWF listed all of the uroplatus species on their ‘top 10 most wanted species list’ of animals threatened by illegal wildlife trade.

Krill declines in parts of Antarctica linked to warming, whales, study says.

Penguin populations have plunged by as much as 50 percent during the past three decades in the West Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Sea, scientists report.