They are the unsung heroes of the planet – the silent majority, the innovators, the grafters, our overlooked friends and protectors.
Invertebrates make up the vast majority of animals on Earth – at last 1.3 million species. They are a wondrously diverse bunch, including insects, arachnids, snails, crustaceans, corals, jellyfish, sponges and echinoderms.
Welcome to the second Invertebrate of the Year competition – which, this time around, will be global. This is your chance to celebrate the marvellous but neglected spineless species that are such vital members of our living planet.
You can nominate any of the unheralded invertebrates that make their living alongside you. It is a daunting choice. Although you wouldn’t know it from sapiens’ utterly spine-sided culture, invertebrates are charismatic, ingenious and occupy all kinds of surprising niches and habitats on land and sea.
Will you choose one of the myxozoans, the smallest animals ever known to have lived, at 10 micrometres in size (a fifth of the diameter of a human hair) or the 14-metre long, half-tonne colossal squid?
Will you choose a bizarre creature that is a world away from our own way of life, simply because it deserves to flourish as much as we do? Or will you nominate one of the creatures without which we would be stuffed?
As the US biologist EO Wilson warned in 1987: “The truth is that we need invertebrates but they don’t need us.”
Last year, readers overwhelmingly chose one of those vital invertebrates, the common earthworm, the graceful soil-maker, which won a landslide 38% of the popular vote.
Bringing up the rear with 0.8% of the vote in the UK contest last year was the invasive Asian or yellow-legged hornet, despite being championed by Chris Packham.
Will a similarly controversial choice triumph in this ominous year of the disrupter?
You decide. Send us your nominated species, and your reasons for your nomination. Your reasons can be personal or global; strictly scientific or as whimsical as you wish. You have until midnight (GMT) on Tuesday 4 March to submit your response.
The most popular and interesting nominations will form a shortlist of ten – and we will profile them, one by one, in March. Then every reader will have the opportunity to vote, campaign, lobby and persuade their friends to back their favourite.
