See 16 Stunning Animal Images From the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards

A clumsy young bullfrog lunges, unsuccessfully, for a butterfly. These scenes and more have been honored in the 62nd Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, developed and produced by the Natural History Museum in London. The judges have selected their 100 winning images, but the full set will not be announced until October.

In the meantime, the world’s leading nature photography contest has revealed a selection of 16 images that offer a sneak peek of what’s to come. This year’s contest received 65,403 entries—a record-breaking amount for the museum—that were submitted by photographers in 121 countries and territories. The competition began in 1965 with only 361 entries, and today, it furthers the museum’s mission to “inspire a love of the natural world and create advocates for the planet.” At the heart of the competition is its conservation mission.

Many photos honored throughout the years capture a dark side of animal life, from habitat loss to trafficking for the illegal wildlife trade. In this new selection, for instance, a photograph depicts a bear trained for a circus performance in Qatar. But beyond that, images of everyday moments in nature that typically play out far from the human eye reveal the beauty of and connections between creatures.

The full collection will inspire in viewers “a renewed sense of wonder for our incredible planet.” Here are the newly released images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest. A single toad might go unnoticed or unappreciated to many in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, a city of more than 14 million residents. But to youth photographer Sora Miyazawa, who noticed this eastern Japanese toad after it hopped out from some bushes, the amphibian was the perfect subject for a photograph.

This image, depicting the toad in front of the blurred lights of Tokyo Tower, is highly commended in the contest’s category for photographers between 11 and 14 years of age. Every morning at sunrise, photographer Shane Gross noticed this school of bigeye trevally swimming near the shore at D’Arros Island, Seychelles. He approached the animals with his camera upside-down to aid its buoyancy as he set up a split shot that captured the scenes both above and below water.

These fish enjoy the relative safety of a Marine Protected Area—the waters around D’Arros Island are legally safeguarded as a no-take zone for fishing as part of the worldwide effort to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and waters by 2030. In this protected zone, “the fish biomass is incredible,” Gross writes on Instagram. In the Namib Desert, such a sandstorm is common, with wind blowing down from the mountains—but that didn’t make it feel any less extreme.