Another year, another whack of incredible wildlife videos. From venom-spraying scorpions to wily wolves, here's a roundup of our favourites from 2025:
The one with the chimpanzee using a stick
Marvellous footage captured in January of this year in a farflung corner of Gabon’s Batéké Plateau National Park shows an inquisitive female chimpanzee probing a camera trap with a stick:
Captured by Gabon’s National Agency for National Parks (ANPN), global wild cat conservation organisation Panthera, and Gaboma Multimedia & Production, the video not only shows a great ape that just a few decades ago was thought to be rare or extirpated from the region, but also documents the first chimpanzee tool-use in this part of Gabon.
The one with the leopard stalking a civet
A daytime showdown between a leopard and a civet is anything but ordinary. In fact, it's downright crazy.
The footage comes to us from Tamsyn du Toit who filmed the encounter recently on the western side of the Kruger National Park and shared her clip with Latest Sightings. An African civet – a raccoon-like omnivore in the same family as genets – is seen sauntering down a gravel road, seemingly unaware of a leopard slinking its way ever closer. The civet appears preoccupied, sniffing the air repeatedly, enticed either by the possibility of a tasty meal or by the scent-trail left by another animal. The leopard nestles into the long grass on the roadside, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
the one with the crab-eating wolf
It's the sort of mystery that leaves ecologists hungry for answers: A submerged crab trap inexplicably hauled out of the depths, ripped open and the bait trap emptied – a few teeth marks the only clue that some sort of predator may be to blame.
It took almost a year and a set of remote cameras for researchers working on a wild stretch for coastline in British Columbia in Canada to identify the culprit: a wily sea wolf. The cunning canid was caught on camera in May last year wading into the depths, tugging on a buoy to which a crab trap was attached and yanking the entire contraption to the shore where it purposefully pulled it open and gobbled up the bait concealed in a cup within the trap. Ecologist Kyle Artelle, who published these findings in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution alongside co-author Paul Paquet, described it as “highly efficient and focused behaviour.”
the one with the venom-spraying scorpion
Venom, and the means by which animals dish it out, is wildly diverse and infinitely fascinating. Some sting, others bite, a few have venomous spikes, and then there's that elite group of animal assassins that have learnt to squirt their venom from a distance, usually (if not always) to deter an attacker. The latest species now confirmed to be a member of the venom-spraying guild is a newly discovered species of scorpion from South America, called Tityus achilles (which is a suitably cool name). And it's the first of its kind from that continent known to exhibit such specialised behaviour.
The species, described in a paper published late last year in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society hails from the Cundinamarca department of Colombia, in the mountainous Magdalena rainforest region. It joins just a handful of scorpion species from two genera found in Africa and North America that have been recorded spraying their venom.
the one with the orcas attacking a blue whale
Among the most titanic of predatory events possible here on Planet Earth—and one that’s only been witnessed a handful of times—played out off the southwestern coast of Western Australia on April 7: a “superpod” of orcas—likely more than 60 of them—taking down a pygmy blue whale. A local whalewatching company, Naturaliste Charters, documented the attack:
“We witnessed an incredible and rare event yesterday as multiple pods of orcas successfully hunted a blue whale in Bremer Canyon,” Naturaliste Charters posted to Facebook. “The intense ordeal lasted less than 40 minutes from when we first saw the blue at the surface to when the battle was over.”
Film and Photo
Natural World
Sharks
