It’s heroic, hardy and less than a millimetre long: meet the 2025 invertebrate of the year | Patrick Barkham

IYou did not vote in the last ballot, as you missed. Here it was a vote where all the ten candidates were creative and moral, and it was a vote that is not committed by doubtful pressure, dribbling polls, or Demagogues. And if you are looking for inspiration from the pleasant power of power as well, do not look beyond the winner 2025: Milnesium TardigdumMicroscopic microscopic animal resembling a pig wrapped in a huge quilt.

Thousands of Guardian readers voted all over the world in the competition, which we invented to celebrate the heroes of our planet who were ignored and others.

It is easy to remain indifferent to the invertebrates. In cities or in the countryside, you hardly touch small, non -spinning things. The animals that we love tend to the spine: the birds that adapted to live next to us or the mammals in which we participated as pets or protein sources.

But we are the posterior monsters are a small minority, hardly 5 % of the planet. Most of life on Earth chose a high path, which are amazing diversity animals: beetles, dual bees, bees; Coral reefs, crabs, cephalopods; Slices, spiders and sponge.

Many of these animals perform vital functions for our homeless planet. Invertebrate Providing the vast majority of pollination that enables us to grow food and enjoy flowers. Invertebrates make the soil, and keep it fertile. It is cleaning water and land arranged, devouring stools or decomposing animals, and repels everything from bad smells to deadly diseases. Of course, some also spread diseases, and has been leaked, bright or plague of human life. But the invertebrates were completely disappeared-and in the places dominated by a person, they irreversibly disappear-the sane person quickly followed.

In some way, with the wreath of its importance towards human prosperity reduces these animals. They are not just boring young servants who move in the service of their human masters. They are wonderfully independent animals. They do not need half to us as much as we need. It also embodies the ways of life that seems unusually strange to our eyes.

Among the 10 brief animals – all of which are nominated by the global community of the guardian readers – LiceSmall crustaceans floundering in the gills, hanging their tongue, eating what the fish eat and sharing enough until the fish survived – for years. Then there Vin Rav SpiderIt extends over the floor, walks on the water and even dive below it in search of prey – small fish and inauguration – greater than itself.

The winner, one of Tardigrades, is particularly impressive. Milnesium Tardigdum I endured all the five previous planetary extinction. Given this, this was an evasive for some individuals to survive in outer space as an experiment. His victory may appear that we are attracted to small but flexible animals in times of global political turmoil. When we feel small and unable, the great microscopic tardigrades gives us hope.

From a raw journalist, all these invertebrates are great stories. For me and my colleagues, spending most of our days to report more examples of how to decompose and destroy life on Earth, the invertebrate competition for the year is a light comfort – for us and we hope for you as well.

But something happens when we start sharing more of these unparalleled stories. Every animal challenges our view of the human world. We realize our lifestyles are strange like WētāpungaJumpless locust. We may think about the value of diverse thinking within our types as well.

And most of all, we start noticing the small things around us. What does it make it rubbed his body by helping him think of the window? Why this ant in such a wheel? We start taking care of the actions of our neighbors.

The great American biologist Eio Wilson expected that human life will not be long for the disappearance of invertebrates. But he also created a great term for this era of ancient Greek: the domos, a new isolated place. Our time is not only the anthroposin, which is dominated by man. It is an era in loneliness.

When I looked around the last day on the loud railway platform in London, I couldn’t see another friend or neighbor. There was no trace of any other animal, plant or fungi. Just we. We are of bold species and we have become solitary, and we hardly realize that this breaks our hearts.

So the invertebrate competition for the year helps us to ask to communicate with friendly neighbors, who live differently from us but those who flourish everything.

Collecting the short list of 10, I came to see them as international celebrities. Then it emerged in the regular suburban garden to spend a vacation in the sun. Status in space, monitored a little Narwhal. She was knocking like a bee, gentle and gentle like bees, but it was in fact a noble with two-edged-one of our brief list. The long, solid brook was like Tusk Narwhal. While she was flying, she dropped the eggs into the grass – near the nests of solitary bees so that her children could eat the descendants of bees. Perhaps, perhaps, but one small sign on a healthy ecosystem – pollinators, predators and parasites, all suitable together.

Now we do not fit. The observation of invertebrates is a small step in realizing that we are not alone, and we share our planet with many wonderful life and we must do better to gently live with them.