Animal Life

Virtual Backgrounds

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Image of white fox sitting in snow.
Arctic fox sitting in snow.

Credit: Alfred-Wegener Institute/Michael Ginzburg
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Image of an endangered antelope fading away.
Extinction risk for 1,700 animal species to increase by 2070. The Nile lechwe is an already endangered antelope species in East Africa.

Credit: Michael S. Helfenbein, Yale University
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Extreme close-up image of male orchid bee.
Researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that orchid bees, like this male, are easier to tell apart by the chemical differences of their perfumes than by their physical appearance.

Credit: Thomas Eltz
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School of fish swimming together in coral reef.
A school of fish swims over the coral reefs of Pagan.

Credit: Photo courtesy University of Guam
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bat flying in the air
Vampire bats hunt with 'friends' in wild.

Credit: Brock Fenton
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a jumping spider
A male jumping spider (Saitis barbipes).

Credit: Photo/Bernard Dupont/Wikimedia Commons (licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International)
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A caribou skull
A caribou skull glistens white against the tundra of northern Alaska.

Credit: Daniel Ackerman
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Monarch butterflies
Monarch butterflies bask in the Florida sun. NSF scientists have been tracking the monarchs’ decline in the hopes of finding clues to saving them.

Credit: Florida Museum photo by Court Whelan
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A bumblebee foraging on blueberry flowers.
A bumblebee foraging on blueberry flowers.

Credit: Winfree Lab
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xray of zebra fish
Confocal microscopy image of nerve fibers in zebrafish brain

Credit: HHMI Janelia Research Campus
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skull of lizard
The skull of an earless monitor lizard, via CT scan.

Credit: Edward Stanley and David Blackburn, Florida Museum of Natural History
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skull of frog
The skull of Hemiphractus scutatus, a horned tree frog from South America.

Credit: Edward L. Stanley, Florida Museum of Natural History
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zebras
Ankole cattle and zebra share grazing lands in central Kenya.

Credit: Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Natural Capital Project, Stanford University
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dinosaurs
Allosaurs attack a sauropod along a beach in what is now Utah, 150 million years ago.

Credit: Todd Marshall
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Butterflyfish school
Butterflyfish school near Acroporid corals at Lord Howe Island, Australia.

Credit: F. Joseph Pollock, Penn State University
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School of Atlantic Silversides seen from below

Credit: Chris Pickerell, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County
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swimming fish
Fish swim along a coral reef in the Line Islands in the central Pacific Ocean.

Credit: Jennifer Smith, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
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catshark glowing in the dark
The chain catshark (Scyliorhinus rotifer) naturally glows in the dark.

Credit: ©J. Sparks, D. Gruber and V. Pieribone
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whale shark
Whale sharks regularly pass nearby when ocean-going science vessels traverse the Pacific ocean.

Credit: Kelly VonDrehle, IODP
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a shark
A shark lurks near the Lost City hydrothermal field deep in the Atlantic ocean.

Credit: Courtesy of Susan Lang, University of South Carolina/NSF/ROV Jason/2018/©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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dolphins
Spinner dolphins school just beneath the surface of the sea.

Credit: Andre Seale, University of Hawaii
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tree frog embryos
Three-day-old embryos of red-eyed tree frogs (Agalychnis callidryas) photographed in Gamboa, Panama.

Credit: Karen Warkentin, Boston University
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