If you didn’t vote in the recent ballot, you missed out. Here was a vote where all 10 candidates were creative and morally upstanding, a vote unsullied by dubious lobbies, dodgy polls or demagogues. And if you’re seeking inspiration from a figure of strength who is also strangely cute then look no further than the winner of 2025: Milnesium tardigradum, a microscopic multisegmented animal that resembles a piglet wrapped in an enormous duvet.
Thousands of Guardian readers around the world voted in the contest, which we invented to celebrate the overlooked, unsung heroes of our planet.
It is easy to remain indifferent to invertebrates. In cities or in the countryside, small, spineless things barely touch our lives. The animals we adore tend to have spines: birds that have adapted to living alongside us or mammals we’ve co-opted as pets or sources of protein.
But we backboned beasts are a tiny minority, barely 5% of the planet’s species. Most life on Earth has chosen a spineless path, and they are animals of amazing diversity: beetles, bivalves, bees; corals, crabs, cephalopods; snails, spiders and sponges.
Many of these animals perform vital functions for our habitable planet. Invertebrates supply the vast majority of pollination that enables us to grow food, and enjoy flowers. Invertebrates make soil, and keep it fertile. They clean water and tidy land, devouring poo or decomposing animals, repelling everything from bad smells to deadly diseases. Of course, some also spread diseases, and may swarm, pest or plague human life. But were invertebrates to completely disappear – and in human-dominated places, they are irrefutably disappearing – sapiens would swiftly follow.
Somehow, however, stressing their importance to human prosperity diminishes these animals. They are not simply dull little butlers dutifully scurrying in the service of their human masters. They are gloriously independent animals. They don’t need us half as much as we need them. They also embody ways of life that look extraordinarily exotic to our eyes.
Among the 10 shortlisted animals – all nominated by the global community of Guardian readers – is the tongue-biting louse, a tiny crustacean that burrows into a fish’s gills and clings to its tongue, eating what the fish eats and sharing enough so the fish stays alive – for years. Then there’s the fen raft spider: it runs on land, walks on water and even dives beneath it in search of prey – small fish and dragonflies – larger than itself.
The winner, one of the tardigrades, is particularly impressive. Milnesium tardigradum has endured all five previous planetary extinction events. Given that, it was a doddle for some individuals to survive being chucked into outer space as an experiment. Its victory might show we are drawn to tiny but resilient animals in times of global political turmoil. When we feel small and powerless, the mighty, microscopic tardigrades give us hope.
In crude journalistic terms, all these invertebrates are great stories. For me and my colleagues, spending most of our days dutifully reporting more examples of how we are degrading and destroying life on Earth, the Invertebrate of the Year contest is light relief – for us and hopefully for you too.
But something happens when we start sharing more of these spineless stories. Each animal challenges our anthropocentric worldview. We realise our own lifestyles are just as weird as the wētāpunga, a giant flightless, jumpless grasshopper. Perhaps we reflect on the value of diverse thinking within our own species too.
And most of all, we start to notice small things around us. What is that fly rubbing its body with his forearms on my windowsill thinking? Why is that ant in such a hurry? We begin to take an interest in the doings of our neighbours.
The great American biologist EO Wilson predicted that human life would not long survive the demise of the invertebrates. But he also devised a plangent term for this epoch from ancient Greek: the Eremocene, a new, isolated place. Our era is not just the human-dominated Anthropocene; it is an age of loneliness.
When I glanced around me the other day on a bustling London railway platform, I could not see another friend or neighbour. There was no trace of any other animal, plant or fungi. Just us. We are a gregarious species and we are becoming solitary, and we barely realise this is breaking our hearts.
So the Invertebrate of the Year contest helps us seek connection with friendly neighbours, who live so differently from us but who thrive all the same.
Compiling the shortlist of 10, I came to see them as global celebrities. Then I popped into my ordinary suburban garden for a break in the sunshine. Idly staring into space, I spotted a little flying narwhal. She was humming like a bee, cute and fluffy like a bee but was actually a dark-edged bee-fly – one of our shortlist. Her long, stiff proboscis was like a narwhal’s tusk. As she flew, she dropped eggs on to the grass – near unseen nests of solitary bees so her babies could eat the bees’ offspring. Gruesome, perhaps, but one small sign of a healthy ecosystem – pollinators, predators and parasites, all fitting together.
Now it is us who don’t fit. Noticing invertebrates is one small step in recognising that we are not alone, and we share our planet with a wondrous multitude of life and must do better to live gently alongside them.
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