Most popular wildlife photos of the year show mice duking it out in the London Underground and a baby leopard carrying an anaconda

Wayne Osborn / Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Photographer Wayne Osborn spotted this male humpback calf 65 feet deep in the waters off the Vava'u Island group in the Kingdom of Tonga.

• The London Natural History Museum's annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition offers the public the chance to vote on their favorite images.
• The front-runners for the people's choice award include images of a rainforest frog enjoying a spidery meal, a lounging leopard, and a curious golden eagle.
• People can vote on their favorites until February 4, 2020.
• Here are 20 of the top photographs in this year's contest.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Humans rarely get to glimpse the the animal kingdom up-close. But each year, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest, which is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum in London, offers a peek into the lives of species around the world.

The contest awards photographers whose work inspires us to consider our place in the natural world and our responsibility to protect it.

This year, photographers from 100 countries submitted 48,000 entries, and contest judges announced a group of winners in October. Now, the public gets to vote on a people's choice award.

The contest organizers curated a shortlist of photographs for this voting process. Many of those images throw into sharp relief the relationships between creatures - mothers and cubs, predators and prey, people and animals. One photo captures a baby jaguar and its mother toting a large anaconda, while another seems to show two mice duking it out on a London Underground platform.

Here are 20 of the best front-runners in this year's people's choice contest. Voting is open until February 4, 2020, and the overall winner will be announced in February after voting ends.