Contented seal, 'stricken' racoon and the chilling fate of a turtle commended in prestigious wildlife photography award

Winning Highly Commended in the Photojournalism category, this image – of 'signatures' made in the blood of snakes skinned by the hands that made them – was shot in Sweetwater, Texas during an annual festival. Rattlesnakes are rounded up using gasoline to drive them into the open, and are then – after a period of imprisonment – tossed into snake pits where they are decapitated, and skinned by paying festival goers. Photographer Jo-Anne McArthur described being disturbed that 'so many of the bloodied handprints belonged to children’.

Impressively timed and dramatic, this leopard seal caught the penguin unawares with an ambush off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Photographer Eduardo del Alamo caught the moment from an inflatable – and unfortunately for the penguin, it too was eventually caught by its formidable assailant.

Snapped in Panama's Soberanía National Park, this image of a brown-throated three-toed sloth netted its photographer attention in the Young Wildlife Photographer: 11-14 years old category.

Found and photographed on Bon Secour National Wildlife Reserve in Alabama, this Kemp's sea turtle – one of the smallest sea turtles, and fiercely endangered – was noosed by a piece of material attached to a broken chair.

National Geographic photographer Thomas P Peschak's image captures a young grey whale rising to meet human hands reaching below the surface in the San Ignacio Lagoon, on the coast of Mexico’s Baja California. Here whales approach tourist boats, evidently in search of contact with people; Peschak describes one whale that got too close for him to focus his camera.

Highly Commended in the Black and White category, a Weddell seal reclines on an ice shelf in South Georgia. In a position where its typical predators of killer whales and leopard seals were out of the picture, the seal appears to relax. The impressively-framed image was shot from an inflatable boat.

A canny improviser, jackfish use jellyfish as makeshift shelters in the open ocean – and have possibly developed immunity to the stinging nettles. Photographer Fabien Michenet, who shot this travelling pair off French Polynesia, commented: 'I've never seen one without the other.'

A 1970 Fort Pinto with a single strategically-placed access hole in the windscreen was the scene of this patiently-gained shot, captured on a deserted farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. Photographer Jason Bantle had been visiting the wreck for several years hoping for the opportunity, noting the hole was just the right size for a racoon to squeeze through – but too large for their key predators, coyotes. As a result the car made the ideal breeding refuge: Bantle could hear the racoon's kits playing in the back seat.

In the Plants and Fungi category, Michel Roggo captured this scene entitled 'The Freshwater Forest' on the bed of Lake Neuchatel, Switzerland. The plants are Eurasian watermilfoil, and whilst the scene is peaceful, the plant is controversial: establishing easily and growing from mere fragments, this type of watermilfoil is an invasive that shades out native species.

An ageing one-eared cheetah is set upon by a pack of wild dogs in Zimanga Private Game Reserve, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Such spats are rare, but numbers were in the dogs' favour, and the cheetah eventually fled.

A festive-looking insect hides a sinister secret: the insect is dead. The antennae emerging from its thorax is a fungus, one of a type of 'zombie' parasites that instructed the insect – a weevil – to climb to a sunny height to allow it to grow fruiting capsules, and release spores. The weevil then clamped on and expired, the fungus using its innards for nutrition.

In Hokkaido, Japan, photographer Diana Rebman came across a group of long-tailed tits and marsh tits drinking from an icicle. She notes that when the thaw came a day later, one intrepid bird landed on the icicle, bringing it crashing to the ground.

A Cyna moth pupae rests in a delicate cocoon net, before emerging as a white, red and black moth. The unlikely location for this stark scene was the wall of a toilet in China.