Introducing Invertebrate of the Year 2025: our celebration of Earth’s essential wonders

We dominate the planet. Or we think we do. But sapiens, and the backboned creatures like us – mammals, fish, birds, reptiles – make up less than 5% of the species on our planet. Life on Earth is overwhelmingly invertebrate, and it is wondrously diverse.

We live alongside at least a million insects, as well as arachnids, snails, crustaceans, corals, jellyfish, sponges and echinoderms. These invertebrates are charismatic, colourful, ingenious and not always small. Sure, there are the myxozoans, the smallest animals ever known to have lived, at 10 micrometres in size (a fifth of the diameter of a human hair), but there is also the 14-metre-long, half-tonne colossal squid.

Unfortunately, we are almost totally spine-sided: we fail to recognise the importance and sheer wonder of invertebrates. So, continuing our bid to rectify that, we at the Guardian are introducing our latest Invertebrate of the Year competition for 2025. We want you – Down to Earth readers around the world – to nominate your favourite invertebrate. We can then all vote for a 2025 champion.

More details on how to take part, after this week’s most important reads.

You have an awesomely daunting choice before you. You can nominate any one of the 1.3m known invertebrates to become Invertebrate of the Year 2025.

You may choose to celebrate a bizarre or beautiful creature with a lifestyle a world away from our own, simply because it deserves to flourish as much as we do. Or you may choose one of the animals without which we would be stuffed. As the US biologist Edward O Wilson warned in 1987: “The truth is that we need invertebrates but they don’t need us.”

Wilson predicted that humanity would not last more than a few months without invertebrates. If we wipe out pollinators, oxygenators, food suppliers, hygienists and all those other unheralded roles performed by billions of invertebrates that bequeath untold benefits to us, we are not long for this world. His words look prescient today, as our actions around the world launch a sixth great extinction.

You can read about last year’s competition here. We focused on UK invertebrates in our shortlist of 11 but this year we are going global. We are keen to receive your entries from all parts of the world.

Last year, readers overwhelmingly chose an invertebrate that is “useful” – vital – for human life: the common earthworm won a landslide 38% of the popular vote.

This dynamic soil-maker and recycler was popular not only for its huge contribution to fertility and growth but also because it has often been a cultural underdog, feared or derided. Many of you hailed its grace and beauty.

Second in the 2024 contest was the rare and endangered shrill carder bee (pictured above), while the romantics’ choice, the glowworm (pictured top), came third. Bringing up the rear with 0.8% of the vote last year was the disrupter, the invasive Asian or yellow-legged hornet, despite being championed by broadcaster and naturalist Chris Packham. His plea for appreciation for this biological marvel even made the front page of the British tabloid, the Daily Star.

Which species will triumph this year? Will it be a more controversial choice in what seems like the year of the disrupter?

I’m starting things off by nominating the fen raft spider, an incredible, fish-hunting beast that pursues its prey on the ground, in the water and on the water. It is an emblem of hope and tolerance for the much-feared arachnids. Once teetering on the brink of extinction in Britain, its populations are thriving again thanks to some brilliant conservation work and individual effort. One ecologist, Dr Helen Smith, raised thousands of spiderlings in her kitchen.

This competition is your contest, and readers will nominate all others on the shortlist. Simply send us your nomination, with your reasons why you love this invertebrate, or why you want it to be more widely celebrated.

We will pick a shortlist and publish a story about each shortlisted invertebrate and what readers say about them. Everyone will then vote for a winner. Please share widely with your friends, in your networks and on your socials.

We live in an increasingly winner-takes-all world. The winner of Invertebrate of the Year 2025 will receive no prize. They will not be elevated above any other species. But we hope this moment of fun, celebration and gratitude will spotlight all invertebrates. We hope it will help us all, in a small way, live a little better alongside our friends and neighbours – our fellow species – with whom we share this miraculous planet.

Read more:

The good news

The bad news

Profiling an inspiring individual, suggested by Down to Earth readers

South Africa-born Kumi Naidoo began his activism at a young age, campaigning against the scourge of apartheid. He has since held prominent roles at organisations including Global Call to Action Against Poverty, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International, and in September was named the president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

Following the death of his son, a rapper, in 2022, Naidoo also founded the Riky Rick Foundation for the Promotion of Artivism, bridging the worlds of arts, culture and activism. He remains steadfastly committed to activism, but also continues to ask how campaigners should innovate.

“The good news is, the level of climate consciousness is higher than ever,” Naidoo told the Guardian’s Dharna Noor in a recent interview. “A lot of that is thanks to activism. But activists must also ask how we can improve. And some of those new approaches, like using arts and culture and using different communication approaches, are some of the things that we do.”

If you’d like to nominate a climate hero, email downtoearth@theguardian.com

Demystifying a climate concept you’ve heard in the headlines

A carbon sink is anything that absorbs more carbon from the environment than it produces, for example plants, soil and the ocean. It is the opposite of a carbon source – such as the burning of fossil fuels.

For more Guardian coverage of carbon sinks, click here

One image that sums up the week in environmental news

Credit: Krystle Wright

Guardian Australia’s Joe Hinchliffe reports this week from Noosa, Queensland. It’s one of the country’s most adored surfing spots – and one of the most at risk to climate change.

To accompany Joe’s reporting, photographer Krystle Wright captured joyful photos like the above of Surfrider CEO (and lawyer by trade) Steph Curley, who is campaigning to draw attention to the at-risk resort area.

For more of the week’s best environmental pictures, catch up on The Week in Wildlife here