A whale exhibition has been providing visitors in northern England with a somewhat different insight into the huge mammals, with a choir of volunteers mimicking the sounds the species make.

Whale spotter and artist Marina Rees has been leading headphone-wearing chorists at the Old Low Light Heritage Centre in North Shields as they listen to, and replicate the marine animal's high and low-pitched sounds.

In Italy, Greenpeace activists assembled life-sized sculptures of two whales emerging from a sea of plastic waste in front of Rome's Pantheon on Thursday.

The large whales, made out of paper, were assembled to raise awareness about disposable plastic waste pollution in the Mediterranean Sea.