The fate of the calf trapped in a British Columbia lagoon has gripped the public. Can Brave Little Hunter be reunited with her pod?

In the early 1960s, Canada’s fisheries ministry installed a .50-calibre machine gun on an island in British Columbia. The weapon, typically used against armoured vehicles and low-flying aircraft, was mounted with the sole purpose of killing orcas. The high-powered gun was never used, but the message was clear: the whales, derisively called “blackfish”, were the enemy.

Now, six decades later and less than 100 miles away from where the gun was mounted, that same ministry has joined residents of a remote community in a frantic attempt to rescue a stranded orca calf.

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The ocean’s depths are not some remote alien realm, but are in fact intimately entangled with every other part of the planet. We should treat them that way. By James Bradley

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Marine biologist Helen Scales had seen octopuses before – but she had never had a meeting quite like this one

• Invertebrate of the year 2024: all hail Earth’s spineless heroes
• Nominate your UK invertebrate species of the year

If I could relive any wildlife encounter, it would be the time last summer when I played peekaboo with an octopus. Usually, when I find myself in the rare company of an underwater celebrity, such as a beautiful, eight-armed cephalopod, only a few fleeting moments pass before I unintentionally scare it away. But this octopus wasn’t going anywhere.

I was floating in knee-high water, heading back to shore after a long free-dive off the coast of Brittany, when I saw the octopus right in front of me. It was a common octopus ( Octopus vulgaris ), a species that has recently been showing up in large numbers along north-east Atlantic coasts . Octopus booms have happened before, most likely linked to warm currents bringing streams of paralarvae, the mini-octopuses that drift for a time before settling on to the seabed. In 1899, fishers in Cornwall and Devon moaned about a plague of octopuses climbing into their crab pots and munching all the bait. In the last few years, octopuses off Brittany have been doing the same thing.

Helen Scales is a marine biologist and writer

Welcome to the Guardian’s invertebrate of the year competition ! Every day between April 2-12 we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here . And at midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate . The winner will be announced on Monday 15 April.

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Highly diverse and charismatic, these creatures deserve recognition as a sixth great extinction dawns

We are prone to obsessing over ourselves and over animals like us. But most of the life on Earth is not like us at all. Barely 5% of all known living creatures are animals with backbones. The rest – at least 1.3 million species, and many more still to be discovered – are spineless.

All hail the invertebrates, animals of wondrous diversity, unique niches and innovative and interesting ways of making a living on this planet. They include insects (at least a million), arachnids, snails, crustaceans, corals, jellyfish, sponges and echinoderms.

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Residents of Balikpapan Bay in eastern Borneo dismiss claims that Nusantara will be a sustainable city that coexists with nature

In eastern Borneo, beyond the thick jungle forests, an epic building project is under way. Giant trucks, cement mixers and diggers lumber along battered roads. Cranes tower overhead. Yellow dust clouds the air, caking everything in reach: the leaves of eucalyptus trees, the sides of passing vehicles and the homes of nearby residents.

This site – a 2,560 sq km area encompassing industrial plantations, mines, Indigenous communities and agricultural land – is to form Nusantara, Indonesia’s new administrative capital.

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When the research team at Vernadsky base are not defending their homeland, they are on the frontline of the climate crisis

When Ukraine’s Antarctic research and supply vessel Noosfera left Odesa on its maiden voyage on 28 January 2022, it passed Russian warships in the Black Sea. A month later, Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour. Noosfera has not been back since.

“A few weeks later, and Noosfera would have been an important symbolic target for Russia,” said Vadym Tkachenko, a biologist who recently completed his second Antarctic winter at Ukraine’s Vernadsky base. The ship now supplies both Ukrainian and Polish Antarctic bases from Chile and South Africa twice a year, at the start and end of the winter.

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Experts are trying everything from drums to whale calls to lure kʷiisaḥiʔis – or Brave Little Hunter – out of the Canadian lagoon she has been trapped in since the stranding death of her mother

As a two-year-old orca calf circled a lagoon off the west coast of Canada on Monday, she heard a comforting sound resonating through the unfamiliar place in which she found herself: the clicks and chirps of her great-aunt.

But the calf, named kʷiisaḥiʔis (pronounced kwee-sahay-is, which roughly translates as Brave Little Hunter) by local First Nations people, could not locate another whale in the shallow waters. The calls, broadcast from speakers placed underwater, were part of a complex and desperate operation still under way to try to save the stranded calf.

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Inexpensive and easy to use, drones are proving invaluable for activists monitoring illegal fishing, hunting and deforestation – as well as keeping tabs on zoos and aquariums

Late last year, UrgentSeas received an anonymous tip from a former employee at the Miami Seaquarium about animal tanks away from public view. The advocacy group went to investigate.

In November, they posted a short clip of what they found by flying a drone over the property: an elderly manatee living alone in a decaying private pool. Within a month, the clip had been watched millions of times and the outcry had grown so intense that the US Fish and Wildlife Service moved the manatee, Romeo, and his mate, Juliet, to a sanctuary.

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Residents and marine officials in British Columbia hope a changing tide will save her orphaned calf

A killer whale stranded off Canada’s west coast has died despite living-saving efforts, but residents and marine officials hope a changing tide will save her orphaned calf.

On Saturday, members of the Ehattisaht First Nation, a coastal community along the north-western reaches of Vancouver Island, spotted an orca trapped on a rocky outcropping.

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