Record-breaking rain in recent months has drastically reduced the amount of food produced in the UK, farming groups have said.

Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn.

It has been an exceptionally wet 18 months. According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount for any 18-month period in England in recorded history. The Met Office started collecting data in 1836.

The UK will be reliant on imports for wheat in the coming year and potentially beyond because of the drastic reduction in yields.

Prices of goods such as bread and other food made using grains are already rising and are likely to rise further, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB).

Wheat production is down 15% since November, the biggest reduction in cropped areas since 2020. Oilseed rape is down 28%, the biggest reduction since the 1980s, and winter barley is down 22% at 355,000 hectares, the biggest reduction since 2020.

The areas that have been planted are likely to produce poor-quality crops as the soil is waterlogged, and some crops are likely to fail. The AHDB said: “The unfavourable weather is putting the yield at risk of being significantly reduced.”

David Eudall, the board’s economics and analysis director, said: “We may see wheat production fall from about 14m tonnes to about 10m tonnes or less, so wheat processors, flour millers and bakers will be looking to import greater quantities of wheat this season for production into bread and animal feed.

“If we see continued lower production from poor weather, stubborn costs (eg fertiliser) and unprofitable prices, we will continually need more imports and further expose our market for a staple product in bread to the world trade.”

The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has reported that the rain, combined with unseasonably low spring temperatures, is taking a toll on livestock farming, with a “bleak attrition rate for lambs born this spring already clear”.

Farmers have said they are facing a crisis. The NFU vice-president, Rachel Hallos, said: “People should be in no doubt about the immense pressure UK farm businesses are under thanks to this unprecedented and constant rain. It’s no exaggeration to say a crisis is building. While farmers are bearing the brunt of it now, consumers may well see the effects through the year as produce simply doesn’t leave the farm gate.

“Combined with input costs which have been soaring for two years, the awful impact of this extreme weather on farmers cannot be overestimated. I have real worries for not just the financial situation of many NFU members, but also the impact this is having on them personally.”

The government has opened a farming recovery fund scheme, under which eligible farmers can access grants of between £500 and £25,000 to return their land to the condition it was in before exceptional flooding due to Storm Henk in January.

The farming minister, Mark Spencer, said: “I know how difficult this winter has been for farmers, with extreme weather such as Storm Henk having a devastating impact on both cropping and grazing, as well as damaging property and equipment.

“The farming recovery fund will support farmers who suffered uninsurable damage with grants of up to £25,000, and sits alongside broader support in our farming schemes to improve flood resilience.”

Octopuses could lose vision and struggle to survive due to heat stress by the end of the century if ocean temperatures continue to rise at the projected rate, a new study has found.

While previous research has suggested octopuses are highly adaptable, the latest research found heat stress from global heating could result in impaired eyesight and increased deaths of pregnant mothers and their unborn young.

The researchers said loss of vision would have significant ramifications for octopuses as they are highly reliant on sight for survival. About 70% of the octopus brain is dedicated to vision, and it plays a crucial role in communication and detecting predators and prey.

Researchers exposed unborn octopuses and their mothers to three different temperatures: a control of 19C, 22C to mimic current summer temperatures, and 25C to match projected possible summer temperatures in 2100.

Octopuses exposed to 25C were found to produce significantly fewer proteins responsible for vision than those at other temperatures.

“One of them is a structural protein found in high abundance in animal eye lenses to preserve lens transparency and optical clarity, and another is responsible for the regeneration of visual pigments in the photoreceptors of the eyes,” Dr Qiaz Hua, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences and the study’s lead author, said.

The study also found that higher temperatures were associated with higher rates of unborn offspring and an increased rate of premature deaths of pregnant mothers.

Eggs did not hatch for two of the three octopus breeds kept at 25C. The researchers said this was due partly to the deaths of mothers while eggs were in early development stages.

Less than half the eggs hatched for the third brood kept at this temperature. The scientists said the mother of this brood displayed “visible signs of stress” not observed in mothers exposed to lower temperatures. They found the hatchlings that survived exhibited an “immense amount of thermal stress and are unlikely to survive into adulthood”.

Hua said it meant “global warming could have a simultaneous impact on multiple generations”.

She said the research highlighted that “even for a highly adaptable taxon like octopuses, they may not be able to survive future ocean changes”.

Bronwyn Gillanders, the head of biological sciences at the University of Adelaide and a co-author of the study, said of the research: “It’s only a change of three or so degrees and you’re starting to see the impairment of organisms.”

Gillanders noted the study was not a direct reproduction of what would happen with global heating, as the octopuses were exposed to a more rapid increase than what would happen over coming decades, and she said it was “hard to tell” if the study’s results would mimic reality in 2100. But she said it was clear that rising temperatures would be bad for octopuses.

Jasmin Martino, an aquatic ecologist at the University of New South Wales who was not involved in the study, said the findings contradicted previous literature, which had suggested that cephalopods – a group including octopuses and squids – may be relative “winners” during the climate crisis due to their adaptability.

“This study reveals that in regions of inescapable heat stress, like the tropics, thermal stress responses may overwhelm octopuses’ capacity to cope,” she said.

More than 800 predominantly Black female and non-binary actors have signed an open letter in solidarity with Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, who has been targeted with online racial abuse after the announcement of her casting in a new production of Romeo & Juliet.

Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim and Marianne Jean-Baptiste are among the 883 signatories of the letter, alongside actors Lolly Adefope, Freema Agyeman, Wunmi Mosaku, and Tamara Lawrance.

It reads: “Too many times, Black performers – particularly Black actresses – are left to face the storm of online abuse after committing the crime of getting a job on their own.”

It comes after a statement by the Jamie Lloyd theatre company condemning the “barrage of deplorable racial abuse” that has been directed at Amewudah-Rivers and saying further harassment would be reported.

The abuse, the company – run by the director Jamie Lloyd – said, followed the announcement of the show’s cast including Amewudah-Rivers as Juliet and Tom Holland as Romeo.

Wednesday’s letter, which was organised by Enola Holmes actor Susan Wokoma and the writer Somalia Nonyé Seaton, stated: “When news of Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’ casting in Jamie Lloyd’s production of Romeo and Juliet was announced so many people celebrated and welcomed this news. Many of us took to social media to shower our baby sis with love and congratulations – a huge deal for someone so young in their career. A huge rising talent.

“But then what followed was a too familiar horror that many of us visible Black dark skinned performers have experienced. The racist and misogynistic abuse directed at such a sweet soul has been too much to bear. For a casting announcement of a play to ignite such twisted ugly abuse is truly embarrassing for those so empty and barren in their own lives that they must meddle in hateful abuse.”

Lynch is best known for her roles in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films (MCU) as well as for playing MI6 agent Nomi in the 2021 James Bond film No Time to Die. Atim is a double Olivier award-winning Ugandan-British actor, singer, composer and playwright who has appeared in a number of stage and TV shows, while Jean-Baptiste came to prominence following her role in the 1996 film Secrets & Lies, for which she received Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta nominations.

The signatories welcomed the theatre company’s statement and said they hoped it would “extend to committed emotional support for Francesca on her journey with the production”.

They added: “Too many times theatre companies, broadcasters, producers and streamers have failed to offer any help or support when their Black artists face racist or misogynistic abuse. Reporting is too often left on the shoulders of the abused, who are also then expected to promote said show.

“We want to send a clear message to Francesca and all Black women performers who face this kind of abuse – we see you. We see the art you manage to produce with not only the pressures that your white colleagues face but with the added traumatic hurdle of misogynoir. We are so excited to watch you shine.”

Romeo & Juliet runs at the Duke of York’s Theatre from 11 May to 3 August and marks Amewudah-Rivers’ West End debut. The actor has previously starred in Shakespeare plays Macbeth and Othello as well as Sophocles tragedy Antigone across London theatres. She also starred in two seasons of the Bad Education on BBC.

The play will also be the Spider-Man star Holland’s first big theatre role since his debut in Billy Elliot: the Musical.

Lloyd is known for mounting bold, megastar-led versions of classic plays such as Doctor Faustus with Kit Harington, Betrayal with Tom Hiddleston and The Seagull with Emilia Clarke. His new production of the musical Sunset Boulevard, with Nicole Scherzinger, recently ended a sold-out run at London’s Savoy theatre and is transferring to Broadway in September.

Last year Lloyd directed Taylor Russell and Paapa Essiedu in a revival of Lucy Prebble’s play The Effect at the National Theatre, before opening at the Shed in New York in March.

Romeo & Juliet is billed as “a pulsating new vision of Shakespeare’s immortal tale of wordsmiths, rhymers, lovers and fighters”.

When the waters rose, Meike and Dörte Näkel weren’t worried. People in this part of the world, the Ahr valley in Germany, are used to it. The river flooded in 2016, bursting its banks and rising almost four metres, and before that in 2013, 1910 and 1804. Many lives were lost in 1804 and 1910, in catastrophes remembered only in stories read from history books to bored schoolchildren. The sisters’ great-grandmother Anna Meyer lived through the 1910 flood, although she never spoke of it to Meike and Dörte.

They are the fifth generation of their family to make wine in the village of Dernau. Meike, 44, is blond, thoughtful and a little serious; Dörte, 42, who has dark hair that comes down to her waist, is quicker to laugh. Both have the same steady gaze. Their father, Werner Näkel, is a hero in the Ahr, widely credited with transforming it from a place where sugar was added routinely to cheap, bad wine into a region with award‑winning vintages.

After studying at the prestigious Hochschule Geisenheim University, the sisters took over the family estate, Meyer-Näkel, and its 23-hectare (57-acre) vineyard. Its winery, where the wine is made and stored, is in a warehouse on the banks of the Ahr.

This is red wine country. Tourists come from across Germany and the surrounding countries to hike the red wine trail, walking from village to village to drink pinot noir from local producers, sometimes at tables in their vineyards. The hills are stubbled with vines that, from a distance, look like the quills on a porcupine. The slopes are so steep that you wonder how anyone could pick the grapes without tumbling down, yet every September the harvest is brought in without incident, mostly by hand. The Ahr threads its way through the villages of Schuld, Altenahr and Dernau, then Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler – the biggest town in the Ahr valley – and on to Sinzig, before joining the Rhine near Bonn.

By 8am on 14 July 2021, the rain was pounding and the river was near-bursting. The sisters and their employees worked quickly to lay down sandbags and close the doors and windows to the winery. When everything was secure, Meike and Dörte sent everyone home.

After that, it all happened so quickly. Around 10pm, the Ahr burst its banks. A gate was smashed by a wave of water. The winery was flooded within an hour. The corrugated iron sheeting on the warehouse walls began to buckle and fold. The water rose so quickly that the sisters took refuge up a flight of stairs in the winery, but they weren’t sure if the metal platform on which they were sitting would collapse. There was no way of accessing the roof and nowhere else to go. “We thought: it’s not so far – maybe we can swim to the vineyards, to get to a drier place,” says Dörte.

They entered the water. It was only 15 metres or so from the winery to higher ground. “But there was no chance of swimming,” Dörte says. “The water just took you where it wanted to.” For a while, they clung to a fence, until the water rose so much that the fence was beneath their feet. The water was five metres deep, at least, and fast-flowing. It was relentless; they could no more swim their way out of it than they could make it run uphill. Just when they feared the worst, the sisters washed into a plum tree.

They would spend the next eight hours shivering in its branches. It was so loud. Boom. Crash. Boom. The roar of the water, but also the screams of their neighbours, trapped on their roofs. They had a torch. Terrifying, random things streaked past in the dark. Trees, cars, shipping containers, petrol tankers; entire houses, detached from their foundations like boats that had slipped their moorings. The tree on which they were sitting suddenly didn’t seem so sturdy. “There was no chance to get to another place,” says Meike. “The strength of the water was so incredible.”

The sisters turned off the light. If something was barrelling towards them, a chewed-up tree or a fuel truck, it was better not to know. If death couldn’t be avoided, why look it in the face? The sisters sat in the darkness, listening to the shrieks and groans of the crashing water and the wails from nearby rooftops, and waited.

Upstream of Dernau, the chaos had begun hours earlier. The rain had fallen with such intensity that by 5.30pm the main road in Altenahr had become a second river. People sought refuge on higher ground, in the village’s 15th-century church. Around 9pm, the villagers who had stayed on lower land to protect their homes and businesses began shouting to each other. The river is coming, they yelled. The river is coming.

Across the region, 150mm of rain fell in 72 hours. The water level is believed to have risen as much as 10 metres that night, although no one knows for certain, because all the measuring apparatus was washed away, leaving only high-water marks on buildings for the scientific record.

All over the Ahr, in Ahrweiler, in Dernau, in Altenahr, the cemeteries gave up their dead. The freshly buried rose first, then the long-departed. Rescue workers would later sift through the mud and the silt to recover these bodies, but also those whose lives were stolen by the flood waters. That night, 188 people died in Germany, many older people who were asleep or unable to get to higher floors.

The Ahr valley is the Florida of Germany, with a high percentage of elderly residents who retire to towns such as Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler for the climate and scenery. Many were not warned of what was coming, even when it might have saved lives. Twelve disabled people died in a care home in Sinzig nine and a half hours after the Ahr had flooded upstream. Evacuation should have been possible. German prosecutors are considering bringing negligent homicide charges against an Ahrweiler district official; the individual in question denies any wrongdoing.

Entire buildings were washed away with their inhabitants trapped inside. Bodies were found as far away as Rotterdam, 150 miles north-west. Steffi Nelles, 48, the owner of Haus Caspari, a family-owned guesthouse on the main square in Altenahr, watched in horror from her upstairs window as the house across from her was wrenched from its foundations with an elderly couple stuck inside. She didn’t know if her building would be next.

In Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, scarcely a street in either of the twinned towns was spared. About 8,800 homes were destroyed across the region. When the waters receded on the morning of 15 July, people who had lived in Ahrweiler their entire lives couldn’t orient themselves. “It was like I was standing on the moon,” says Marc Adeneuer, 60, a wine producer. “It was unbelievable.” He stood in the town square for 15 minutes, trying to understand where he was. He went to the cemetery where his son and his father were buried. Their headstones had disappeared.

In their plum tree, as they waited for a rescue they weren’t sure would come, Meike and Dörte tried to keep their spirits up. First, they assessed their options. What had become of the 380 barrels in their winery? Had any survived intact? They soon came to the conclusion that everything must have been destroyed. They tried to remember if they had flood insurance. (They did.) The next question: would they cut their losses and walk away? “It sounds really crazy, but I think it was a survival thing, from the brain,” says Meike. They were in accord: they would rebuild. “We are like our wine,” says Meike. “We have deep roots inside.”

In the historic town of Ahrweiler today, the fish-scale roofs glint in the winter sun and the medieval timbered houses lean charmingly. But inside the buildings, everything is new, from the plush carpets to the thick, richly patterned wallpaper. In Hotel Villa Aurora, the most luxurious hotel in town, art deco lamps gleam gold and bronze. At the nearby Adenauer winery, you can drink from fine crystal glasses on pale wood benches. Everything is new and nicely done.

It was paid for with insurance money, government money – federal and state authorities made available €30bn (about £26bn) for reconstruction – and the owners’ own funds. “We have to get away from this idea that: ‘Oh my God, there was a flood, we are such poor people, please come here and visit us because it’s so bad,’” says Carolin Groß, the head of marketing at Ahrwein, an association of local wine producers. “No. We want to talk about quality.” Adeneuer agrees: “We don’t want pity.”

But the tourists haven’t returned in their old numbers. There aren’t enough hotels open, but, more importantly, the infrastructure isn’t there. The railway line between Walporzheim and Ahrbrück was washed away in the flood and won’t be rebuilt until the end of 2025. The picturesque Ahr cycle path is mostly closed. Many of the campsites that appealed to younger and more cost-conscious tourists won’t reopen; they should never have been permitted in the first place. The hillsides are too rocky and vertiginous, while the schist bedrock doesn’t allow water to infiltrate, meaning that rainwater shoots off the hills in torrential flows.

Without enough beds, or a way of getting to the nearby cities of Cologne and Bonn, the tourists mostly don’t come; when they do, they visit only for the day, leaving before dinner instead of wining and dining until late in the night. “When you want to spend your holiday, you want to have it nice,” says Dörte. “It’s understandable. People want to help the Ahr valley, but they don’t want to walk through the dirt on their holidays for two weeks.”

All along the Ahr, and especially in the villages further up the valley, construction trucks spray gravel across the road and spindly cranes pick at the hillsides. The landscape is pockmarked with diggers and piles of earth. Everywhere you go, you see construction placards and metal fencing, workers in hard hats and scaffolders with poles, portable toilets and piles of building materials. Almost three years on, children go to school in shipping containers. You will find derelict houses along all the main streets in Altenahr and Dernau. Some are being renovated by students, some await demolition, some have owners who are involved in tortuous disputes with governments and insurers.

Nelles is in the latter camp. When I visit her at Haus Caspari, the Altenahr guesthouse her grandfather bought after the second world war, she is close to tears from stress. The main, eight-bedroom guesthouse – there are two smaller buildings that Nelles hasn’t even begun to refurbish – is a building site, with more than a dozen people at work. We struggle to hear each other over the burring of drills. Nelles says she was assured by various professionals that government funds and insurance payouts would cover the cost of her rebuild, only to realise later that she couldn’t claim as much as she had hoped, by which point work had already started. She is €800,000 short of what she needs to complete the work.

“So, we have no plan for what to do now,” she says, blinking back tears. “This is my parents’ house. We made this plan and everything was going to be finished for them and they were looking forward to it. They’re in their late 70s. They can’t really understand it.”

After the floods, when the entire German press decamped to the Ahr, Nelles’ neighbours gave interviews and started crowdfunding pages that raised thousands of euros. “You think you’re so stupid,” says Nelles. “Why didn’t you go on television and put your kids in the front row and say: ‘We are poor people – please give us money’? Because other people did that and they are now finished with building – they live a good life.”

Hundreds of people travelled to the Ahr in the aftermath of the floods to work as volunteers. Nelles would be working in a human chain to shift flood debris and suddenly a total stranger would join the chain. “You had this feeling you are not alone,” she says. “People came and helped you.” But there were also disaster tourists. “Families with their children, in white trousers, taking pictures,” Nelles says in disbelief. She felt “like a monkey in a zoo”.

At the time of my visit, Nelles has only enough money to pay the builders for another fortnight. “We don’t know what will happen,” she says. “In the next two weeks, something must happen. I don’t know what. But something must work out.” She takes me on a tour of the partly refurbished building. The reception area has been freshly tiled with green porcelain; the day the tiles arrived was a good day. “For a few minutes, you feel really good,” she says. “You think you did a really good job. But then reality hits you again.”

We go into the basement, where an electrician is at work on a fuse board that takes up most of the wall. This will be Haus Caspari’s kitchen, where Nelles’ sister Andrea Babic, 45, will bake her cakes, which are famous in the village. Babic is with us. She inspects her €8,000 industrial cake mixer, which has been recently delivered.

The sisters have invested in better windows, relocated a lift, blocked up their basement windows and built a small wall to go around the perimeter of the guesthouse. But it won’t protect them from another flood of the magnitude of 2021’s – they know that. So much expense to rebuild. All that equipment in their basement. And the Ahr scarcely three metres away.

There is a well-known term in hydrological circles: flood dementia. “Every couple of decades, people tend to forget about historical events,” says Stefan Greiving, a professor of spatial planning at the Technical University of Dortmund.

The Ahr has always flooded, sometimes with significant loss of life. In 1910, 200 people died in the valley. In a tunnel leading into Altenahr, plaques denote the high-water marks of historic floods. “In the immediate period after the event, there’s a small window of time for implementing and approving radical solutions,” says Greiving. “But this is probably limited to a couple of months after the event.” After the 1910 floods, officials considered building a reservoir near Rech, a small village in the Ahr, to collect water in case of flooding. Instead they built the Nürburgring racing track, to create jobs during a time of high unemployment.

Flood-affected communities in the Ahr are actually disincentivised from making their homes more flood-resilient. In the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which includes Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler and surrounding villages, people are required to rebuild on a one-for-one basis, meaning exactly as they were. If you are rebuilding a school, say, and you want to move the science laboratory from the ground floor to the third, so that equipment can be protected in the case of another flood, insurers and government funds won’t cover the cost of fitting. Everything needs to be as it was.

“Sometimes, I have the feeling that people could forget about the floods too early,” says Charlotte Burggraf, an employee of the district administration of Ahrweiler. “When you ask them in 10 years, they’ll say: ‘The floods won’t come again.’ But they will. And you don’t know when. You need to be getting protection and you need early-warning systems. And from what I see, that’s maybe a problem in the future. People may forget how dramatic the events of 2021 really were.”

Across the Ahr, people have rebuilt as before, without flood mitigation measures in place. “We see this problem,” says Meike. “They do exactly as it was before. That is a very strange thing. For a lot of people, it’s a very positive mental thing, making things how they were. Perhaps they try to help themselves, by making it as it was.”

The flood of 14 July was particularly catastrophic for multiple reasons. It was the summer, so no one was prepared for it. It happened during the night-time. The authorities failed to issue warnings and mandatory evacuations until it was too late. But it was more than that. The Ahr had not flooded with significant loss of life for more than 100 years. People weren’t prepared. And their homes had been built in places that never should have been inhabited, let alone densely populated.

The Romans knew to build away from the Ahr; the medieval church fathers, too. The churches in Altenahr and Dernau did not flood, because they were built on higher land. When Dörte and Meike were children, they had to walk uphill to their school, situated in an old monastery in Ahrweiler. They would gripe about the steep climb. But the monastery didn’t flood, either. Their father used to tell them that, when he was a child, there were flood-retention areas around the Ahr, which are now built up. Houses were built up stone steps from the road.

“Historical knowledge was more valued in the past,” says Greiving. “Most city centres were built on top of hills, in safe areas. The later extensions to the city entered the flood-prone areas.” Even the best-designed flood defences may fail, particularly in an age of climate emergency. “There is a responsibility for individuals to prepare themselves for extreme events,” says Greiving. “And that is, in our modern societies, particularly in larger cities, an enormous weakness.”

Meike says: “I think, in the past, people were more careful about where they built. Why have we forgotten? Are we so stupid or self‑confident that nothing can harm us? That is kind of crazy.”

When they were studying wine cultivation at university, the Näkel sisters were taught to strip everything away and use only the evidence of their senses. They learned to smell things before tasting them. “Who, in our society, smells an apple before biting into the apple?” asks Meike.

Their father, Werner, had already taught them that winemakers should think not in years, or even decades, but generations. A vineyard will take five years before it produces its first yield and a decade before the yield is of any quality. “The older the vines, the better the wine will be,” says Meike. The week before we meet, Dörte and Meike replanted a vineyard Werner planted with his father when he was 18. The crop was still good, but the rows were too close together for modern methods of harvesting. “Otherwise, we’d have kept it,” says Dörte. “Because they were really nice old vines, with the roots going very deep.”

For years, the sisters had seen the climate crisis affect the way they worked. Their summers went from being wet to dry and hot. There were weeks without rain, something that would have been impossible in the past. Rather than removing the leaves from the vine to keep the grapes dry and healthy, now the sisters left them, to cast a shadow. The harvest moved forward a month, from October to September.

After the July 2021 floods, they knew that climate breakdown would make these extreme weather events more likely. “My father always said: ‘We cannot change the weather,’” says Meike. “We have to work with it.” They drive me to their vineyard, up twisting roads. The vines tumble away from us down the hillside. “Humans are just tiny against nature,” says Dörte, surveying her vines from the top of a hill.

Werner taught them to plan long-term when planting their vines, to understand and respect nature. Their university lecturers taught them to listen to their senses. So, Dörte and Meike have decided to relocate their winery from the banks of the Ahr to the top of a hill. It took them a year and a half to persuade the farmer to sell the land. Their insurance will not cover the relocation, so they are putting up the money themselves. They hope to start construction this winter.

“We are very sure that, in the lives of our children, or our grandchildren, something like the flood will happen again,” says Meike. “And when you look at how a winery works, or what it means to work in a vineyard, we are always talking in generations. What I plan now must also stand in the next generation.” So, they have to move the winery. It’s the only responsible thing to do.

After the flood, the sisters thought they had lost everything. But then the phone calls came: a barrel of wine had been found in this person’s garage, or in front of that building. It was a race against time to recover the 300kg barrels before the wine spoiled in the sun. In all, the sisters rescued nine barrels. They call these wines the Lost Barrels. Afterwards, they had to bring in that year’s harvest. “We didn’t have our own machines; we didn’t even have a bucket,” says Dörte. They wanted to commemorate, in a small way, everything they had been through. They didn’t want to avoid talking about the flood, as their great‑grandmother had done. So they put waves on their 2021 bottles. “We want to keep the memory alive,” says Meike. “To talk about the flood.”

Meike and Dörte are outliers in the Ahr. It has been nearly two years since the floods and flood preparedness is not on the national agenda. Some municipalities have implemented useful initiatives, but there is no overall leadership, says Greiving. “There is no long-term vision. What is the overarching goal or objective for a flood-resilient Ahr valley in 20 years?”

Before I leave the Ahr, I walk along the main promenade that connects Ahrweiler and Bad-Neuenahr. The river is low and gentle today. There is construction all along it, on both sides of the bank. Recently rebuilt houses sparkle in the sun. I pause in front of a white, three-storey house that looks to be freshly repainted. A child’s bedroom on the ground floor faces the river. I can see a brightly patterned duvet and clowns hanging from a mobile. From their bedroom, a few metres away, the child will see the Ahr flow past. As they sleep, it will continue to flow, in all its danger and beauty.

At a press conference in February, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, told a room full of reporters: “We’re not going to do that fake meat. That doesn’t work.” He’d been discussing legislation under debate in the statehouse that would ban cell-cultivated meat – an emerging technique that, instead of slaughtering animals for consumption, grows meat in a lab using a small sample of animal cells.

A few weeks later, a Republican member of the Florida legislature – and cattle rancher – Dean Black took to the House floor, saying, “Cultured meat is not meat … it is made by man, real meat is made by God Himself … If you really want to try the nitrogen-based protein paste, go to California.”

In March, Florida passed the legislation both men had been addressing: making it the first state in the nation poised to ban “lab-grown” meat. (DeSantis still needs to sign the bill.)

Florida isn’t the only state on track to ban cell-cultivated meat. Three other states – Alabama, Arizona and Tennessee – are currently debating legislation that would ban the production or sale of cell-cultivated meat, despite the fact that cell-cultivated meat isn’t actually on sale anywhere in the country. Sixteen states plus the federal government have already instituted regulations on labeling cell-cultivated meat, such as prohibiting companies from using the word “meat” in their marketing, or requiring them to print a disclosure explaining that the product contains cell-cultured products.

But experts say these new laws sweeping red states aren’t so much about the many safety, ethical and environmental questions lab-grown meat pose – they’re about the culture wars.

“These are political efforts to rile up voters,” says Sparsha Saha, a lecturer on meat politics at Harvard, who notes that cell-cultivated meat is a long way away from being produced on scale to reach most consumers. “Meat is inherently political. We know that meat attachment is higher on the right. We know that masculinity norms tend to be stronger among conservative men – and meat is associated with masculinity … If you’re a politician and you want to make sure that conservative men are getting mobilized to come out and vote, this is a really good political strategy.”

At the same time, the focus on cell-cultivated meat serves as a distraction from other, more important food issues, Saha says, like “the fact that a lot of people can’t afford their groceries any longer”.

Lab-grown meat is still a new technology. In 2013, a Dutch scientist created the first cell-cultivated meat product for human consumption. Growing cell-cultivated meat requires taking a sample from an actual animal, and then feeding that sample nutrients like amino acids, vitamins, sugar and salts while it grows in a bioreactor. This, supporters say, eliminates many of the environmental problems – deforestation, water contamination, greenhouse gas emissions – posed by animal agriculture.

Although more than 150 companies are now working in the cell-cultivated meat industry worldwide, it’s not yet widely available to the public: Only two restaurants in the US have sold cultivated meat. In 2023, restaurants in San Francisco and Washington DC sold cell-cultivated chickens developed by Upside Foods and Good Meat – but those products are no longer available at either restaurant.

As the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) debated federal regulations for this new technology, states across the US began requiring special labels for cell-cultivated meat. In 2018, Missouri became the first state to pass such a law. The following year, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming followed suit. Kansas, Louisiana, Georgia and Texas have since joined them.

Chloe Marie, a research specialist at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Agricultural and Shale Law, said it was “pretty unclear” who would have the authority to regulate cell-cultured food: “We were very much in uncharted territory. And so because of that, many stakeholders started pushing for some regulatory actions.”

A new Republican-sponsored bill introduced to Congress earlier this year, the Fair and Accurate Ingredient Representation on Labels Act of 2024, would authorize the USDA to regulate “cell-cultured” and “imitation” meat product labels. Democratic senator Jon Tester and Republican senator Mike Rounds also introduced a bill to ban cell-cultivated meat in school lunch and breakfast programs, even though it’s not currently available in any school lunches – or anywhere else in the US – with backing from the US Cattlemen’s Association. (Although conservatives have strongly favored labeling efforts for cell-cultivated meat, they’ve called out labeling of other products, like sugary drinks and junk food, as government overreach.)

The state bans introduced this year go a step further and prohibit the development and sale of cell-cultivated meat. Anyone found in violation of the ban in Florida or Alabama could be charged with a misdemeanor, while those who violate the ban in Tennessee could be fined up to $1m.

“We want to protect our cattle and our ranches,” said Arizona representative Michael Carbone.

The US Cattlemen’s Association, the main lobbying group for American beef producers, is also pushing back against lab-grown meat, saying in 2022 that “cell-cultured products cannot be independently produced – the technology is shrouded in intellectual property protection and requires intensive capital resources” which “could lead to the monopolistic control of America’s sovereign food supply”.

While defenders of these bills say they’re concerned about the safety of new techniques, experts say there’s also a politicized fear of science at play. “Historically, science has been a friend to agriculture. And instead of us being accurate about that relationship in the past, I think what we’re seeing on the right is this undermining of science that perhaps started with Covid, if not earlier with vaccines,” said Saha.

Amid these bans, California is investing in cell-cultivated meat. As animal agriculture is increasingly recognized as a key contributor to the climate crisis, lab-grown meat has been pointed to as a potential solution. Though many environmental experts worry it’s a solution that will come too late – and that allowed us to forgo the difficult work of rethinking our relationship with meat and agriculture. In 2022, California became the first state in the nation to publicly fund cell-cultivated meat research. And the year before, the USDA gave Tufts University in Massachusetts $10m to support a cellular agriculture institute. However, the vast majority of funding for cell-cultivated meat has come from venture capital.

The North American Meat Institute, the country’s largest trade association for meat packers and producers, and dozens of biotech investors have spoken out against bans like the one Florida is set to pass – arguing that it will stifle innovation and limit consumer choice.

“We think consumers should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to try cultivated seafood. The USDA and FDA should continue to regulate food products in this country, not state legislators who lack the required expertise in food safety,” said Justin Kolbeck, co-founder and CEO of Wildtype, a cultivated seafood company, who says he and his colleagues have traveled to Arizona, Alabama and Florida to discuss pending bans. “Rather than bowing to special interest groups who are trying to stifle innovation, we’ve encouraged state legislators to work with our industry on clear labeling.”

Even if Desantis signs his state’s cultivated meat ban into law in coming weeks, Marie suspects the issue won’t be laid to rest. “A lot of environmental or food conscious associations have challenged many of these labeling laws,” she said. In states like Arkansas and Mississippi, companies sued to challenge laws that would have prevented them using terms like “meatless meatballs” and “plant-based jumbo hotdogs”. Marie says she “would not be surprised if they also challenge these banning laws”.

A rocky path, strewn with thick tree roots, leads from a dirt road down to a small green hut overlooking the choppy waters of the Beagle Channel, a strait between Chile and Argentina. The shack is home to Diane Mendez and her family but doubles as Alama Yagan, one of nine restaurants in the fishing village of Puerto Almanza.

The village, in Argentinian Tierra del Fuego, has become a foodie haven, and the final stop on the king crab route, a trail that starts in the provincial capital Ushuaia, 45 miles to the east. But things could have been different.

In 2021, the provincial government voted to ban intensive salmon farming in Argentinian waters, after campaigners successfully argued that it would wreak environmental havoc, close down local fishing fleets and threaten the established nature-tourism sector, which employs 16,500 people.

“Everything in the sea has benefited from the ban on industrial salmon farming,” says Mendez. “The whole ecosystem was saved, from the crabs to the seaweed; they all depend on a healthy Beagle Channel.”

For chefs such as Mendez, the sea is her larder. It provides the centolla, or king crab, for which the region is famous, as well as mussels, which her husband freedives to collect each day, and huge kelp forests, which she harvests to use in her cooking. And it’s all shared with colonies of sea lions, rock shags, and the occasional southern right whale passing through.

The success in Tierra del Fuego led to the formation of the Global Salmon Farming Resistance (GSFR), an alliance of environmental organisations and scientists that is pushing for others to follow Argentina’s lead. The Falkland Islands has also banned the farms, while the Canadian province of British Columbia has promised to “transition away” from salmon farming by 2025. The US state of Washington has also banned them.

But in neighbouring Chile, the same level of protection does not exist. “Things drastically changed over the years with the arrival of this industry,” says Daniel Casado, a film-maker and activist for Centinela Patagonia, a group of biologists, engineers, artists and fishers who monitor the marine ecosystem around the salmon farms.

The first open-net salmon farms arrived in Chilean waters in the 1980s, where the sheltered coastline and cold currents offered perfect conditions. They went unnoticed initially, but now there are an estimated 1,400 dotted among the islands and inlets of the Chiloé archipelago.

“They pretty much destroyed the Chiloé area,” says Casado. Now, the industry is moving south, threatening some of Chile’s last stretches of pristine coastline. This includes Magallanes, a region he describes as the last frontier before Antarctica, and home to the Kawésqar national park.

The park has become the new frontline in the battle against salmon farming due to a quirk in the law that means only its land, not its waters, are protected. Yet ironically, the Kawésqar, an Indigenous people who live in the area, are a nomadic “canoe people”, who live on the water, not the land.

As a result of the way the law works, the fjords and channels are becoming a new hub for the salmon industry and Casado fears the continued growth of the farms will devastate local ecosystems and fishing communities.

Artisanal fishing has all but disappeared in Chiloé, he says, with local laws preventing people accessing traditional fishing grounds close to the farms. Salmon are also alien to Chilean waters, and the millions that escape each year outcompete indigenous species. There are simply no fish left to catch, says Casado.

By exceeding stocking limits and placing nets too close together, the farms are also affecting water quality, he claims. “Dead zones” are appearing directly beneath the pens – patches of seabed that are devoid of life due to the buildup of fish faeces and other detritus. “In many areas there is a complete lack of oxygen – nothing can live,” he says.

The charge sheet continues, with activists also placing the blame for huge algal blooms, or “red tides”, on the farms. The algae flourishes in the artificially nutrient-rich waters around the pens, and often proves toxic to fish, including salmon, and other marine species.

“The industry says this is natural and not down to them,” says Casado. “But in reality, the eutrophication of the area, by putting so much stuff in the water, causes a big change in the environment.”

The Chilean government has also begun striking deals with fish farms that have been set up in national parks illegally by relocating them to new sites, he says.

“The government needs to start taking this issue seriously; otherwise businesses will continue to destroy an area, move on and do it all over again, until there will be no other place to go,” Casado says.

The industry disputes the effects it has on the environment. Catarina Martins is chief sustainability and technology officer at the Norwegian multinational Mowi, which is one of the world’s largest salmon-farming businesses and has a huge presence in Chile.

She believes the likes of the GSFR paint an out-of-date picture of a well-regulated industry that operates within strict frameworks. “We are not the cause of these dead zones,” she says.

It is simply easier to blame the industry for events such as the algal blooms, she argues, rather than considering more complicated causes, such as the effects of the climate emergency on ocean dynamics and water temperature.

The industry is looking at ways to reduce its footprint, says Martins. For instance, introducing fallow periods of between four to six weeks, when no fish are farmed, helps to avoid any “cumulative impact” on the seabed, giving the environment time to recover. Skirts around the top of the pens are being installed to prevent infestations of sea lice, a parasite that can thrive in fish farms and decimate the salmon. This has also cut the need for medicated feeds containing antibiotics, which can leach into the environment.

Underwater lights encourage salmon to feed at different levels, moving them around the pens and preventing disease from spreading so easily. Critics, however, suggest that not enough research has been carried out into their effects on other fish and marine mammals.

Outside Alama Yagan, an Argentinian flag flutters in the strong breeze. Mendez is taking a break after cooking lunch for half a dozen visitors from Ushuaia.

She used to work with Chilean fishers and is sorry for those who have lost their livelihoods, but grateful too that Argentina was able to learn lessons from their experience and prevent the salmon farms from coming to the Beagle Channel.

“If salmon farming had been allowed here it would have been a betrayal of the fishing community and the ecosystem as a whole,” she says.

Four years ago, Berkeley made history when it became the first city in the US to ban natural gas hookups in new buildings.

It was a natural step for the famously progressive California community, which was an early adopter of curbside recycling in the 1970s, banned styrofoam in 1988, and more recently led the charge to outlaw single-use packaging and plastics.

But today the ban is dead in the water, after a lawsuit brought by a restaurant trade group challenged its legality, tying the ban’s enforcement up in court for years. Last month, the city finally gave in and began the process of repealing it.

For a moment, the news appeared devastating for efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. But even without the historic ban, local climate advocates and restaurant owners are imagining ways Berkeley could still lead a national push to transition away from natural gas, amid growing public awareness of its harms to both the climate and human health.

Alastair Iles, a professor of sustainability transitions at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers how community groups rallied with local legislators to introduce and pass the ban. “Communities and activists around the city identified very closely with the ban’s successful passing, and saw it as a sign that the city is continuing to tackle the challenge of climate change.”

He said these groups aren’t giving up hope that Berkeley can still set an example. “From what I have heard, they are upset, sad, and disheartened that the ban has been overturned,” said Iles. “But they also know that there are alternative ways forward.”

‘Fossil fuel-free city’

Berkeley has long been a leader on progressive climate legislation, and in 2018 the city council resolved to become a “fossil fuel-free city”.

So it wasn’t a surprise in July 2019 when the Berkeley city council unanimously passed an ordinance preventing natural gas hookups in new residential and commercial construction. At the time, nearly a third of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions came from natural gas. The move was lauded by environmental organizers as a step towards California’s goal of achieving 100% zero-carbon energy by 2045.

Berkeley’s move sparked a wave of action, and an inevitable backlash. In the years since, 135 cities and counties have introduced some type of building decarbonization ordinance. At the same time, 24 mostly red states have done the opposite, passing laws that prohibit cities from banning natural gas.

Yet before Berkeley’s natural gas ban could even take effect in January 2020, the California Restaurant Association (CRA) filed a lawsuit arguing both that the ban harmed restaurant owners who rely on gas stoves and also that, under the 1975 Energy and Policy Conservation Act, only the federal government has the authority to regulate energy standards for appliances.

Thus ensued a lengthy back and forth between the city and the trade group. In 2021, a US district judge sided with Berkeley, ruling that the city wasn’t trying to regulate appliances, but instead the fuel they used. CRA then took their case to the ninth circuit court of appeals, which ruled against the ban. In January 2023, Berkeley lost its request to have the case reheard and could have appealed to the US supreme court, but instead chose to settle with the CRA. Some environmental advocates have pointed out that the natural gas utility SoCalGas provided financial support to the restaurant association.

“Very likely, Berkeley decided that it might be counterproductive to keep the case going, because a loss could hurt similar city and state laws in other parts of the country along with California,” given the supreme court’s current conservative majority, said Iles. “More importantly, the supreme court could easily have made a more expansive ruling than needed, as it often has in the past few years, meaning that a range of options to require gas-free buildings could be prohibited.”

‘Cooking with gas is really a mindset’

The debate over natural gas has heated up in the past year, following 2023 studies that found gas stoves could be linked to more than 12% of childhood asthma cases in the US, and emit indoor pollutants at levels worse than secondhand smoke.

Despite the Berkeley blow, environmental leaders and business owners – including some of the city’s leading restaurateurs – don’t see this as the end of the road. Although Iles suspects other California cities will stop pursuing natural gas bans, he says many are considering alternative policy pathways.

“Learning from Berkeley’s ill-fated experience, cities across California and the US west have already introduced different rules focused on energy performance,” which require buildings to lower their energy usage but don’t set specific requirements as to how, he said, creating an incentive to use electric or solar rather than gas appliances without mandating it. “Cities can also set air pollution emission standards to favor electric appliances.”

Iles adds that last September, mayors from 25 California cities wrote to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, “urging him to set statewide building codes that would require new buildings to be fully electric”. Just last month, California released a draft update to its building code that will encourage the use of heat pumps, which are fossil fuel-free heaters that are more efficient than gas furnaces, in all new homes beginning in 2026.

Meanwhile, despite the CRA’s stance, many chefs in Berkeley and beyond are considering their role in leading the way toward electrification. Last year, chef Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Michelin star restaurant Chez Panisse told Yahoo News that she plans to transition the restaurant to electric stoves, and that a new bar opening up next door would also use electric cooking.

“It’s a matter of getting used to it,” she told the outlet. “You just have to know a little more about cooking with it. It’s not rocket science.” In response to a Guardian inquiry about the transition, a spokesperson for Chez Panisse said there were no updates to share yet and that the bar was still under construction.

“Cooking with gas is really a mindset,” agrees chef Grégoire Jacquet, owner and founder of Grégoire, a high-end take-out restaurant in Berkeley who is exploring bringing more electric equipment into his kitchen. “Nowadays there is some stuff that really is pretty awesome when it comes to electric.”

But he acknowledges that it’s scary for chefs who have trained on gas stoves to make the switch, especially given the cost of buying new equipment. “I think if we all want to switch to electric, it’s going to take a lot of education and a lot of training.”

He hopes culinary schools will begin training new chefs on electric stoves early in their education, and that local governments will consider giving restaurants grants to encourage transitioning to electric, and to help cover the costs.

As Jacquet expands his business with new franchise locations, he’s planning to source both gas and electric cookers. It’s a sign of where the city, and others across the country, could be headed. The transition to electric is happening, says Jacquet. “But not fast enough,” he adds. “Because the Earth is dying.”

National parks are failing to tackle the biodiversity crisis, with just 6% of national park land in England and Wales managed effectively for nature, according to the first full assessment of how well they are supporting nature recovery.

National parks, which cover 10% of England and 20% of Wales and this year celebrate their 75th anniversary, are not restoring nature because of a chronic lack of government funding and because they were designed for a different era, according to the report by the Campaign for National Parks (CNP) charity.

The parks’ direct grant from government has been cut by 40% in real terms since 2010, with most national parks only receiving several million pounds – equivalent to the annual budget of a small secondary school.

Ruth Bradshaw, the policy manager for the CNP, said: “National parks are special places and they are the last refuges for struggling species like curlew, hen harrier and cuckoo. Nature in the national parks isn’t immune from the crisis that is happening elsewhere but there are huge opportunities to bring it back to good health. We need urgent action and major changes – the government needs to strengthen legislation and significantly increase the resources that are going into nature recovery in the national parks.”

National parks are key to Britain meeting its commitment to protecting 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030 but nature is still in retreat in these protected areas.

Peatlands, which store carbon and cover 43% of the land within national parks, are in poor condition: an estimated 1% of Dartmoor’s deep peat area is in a healthy condition, according to the CNP report. There had been virtually no change in woodland coverage across national parks in the five years to 2020, and rivers and lakes are in worsening health. The 47% of rivers in national parks judged in “good” health in 2013 fell to 39% in 2022.

Apart from the lack of funding, national parks are struggling to restore nature because only 13.7% of national park land is publicly owned, with the vast majority privately owned and managed as farmland. Most of this land has suffered from the same nature losses linked to the intensification of farming over the past 75 years in the rest of Britain.

Part of the problem, the CNP report said, was that national parks were created 75 years ago to address fears of urbanisation. Although enhancing wildlife is one of the parks’ statutory duties, the parks have not changed their mission to reflect the 21st-century climate and extinction crises.

The CNP is calling for a new deal for national parks, with the government setting a clear new priority that they are for nature protection and restoration alongside a doubling of core national park grants to restore 2010 funding levels.

It wants a ban on all burning of moorlands within national parks, a common practice on shooting estates; a ban on all forestry plantations on any depth of peat soil, a practice which can degrade peatlands and cause more carbon emissions; and the licensing of driven grouse shoots to reduce the illegal persecution of threatened species such as hen harrier.

It also wants government agencies, including the Ministry of Defence and Forestry England, and water companies to pay for the restoration of areas that have suffered from historic damage such as pollution, the planting of conifers on peatland and the cost of removing unexploded ordnance which makes restoration much more expensive.

It suggests creating citizen’s assemblies for every national park to better ensure that every citizen of whatever age, race and class feels welcome and can participate in decision-making within the parks alongside commoners – those who use the land for grazing animals – as well as farmers and landowners.

National parks are facing a long-running funding crisis. The Yorkshire Dales is facing a £4m hole for 2025-26 and some parks have warned they will need to close visitor centres or cut back on footpath management, reducing public access.

Tony Gates, the chief executive of Northumberland national park, where the core grant from Defra has shrank from £3.7m in 2006 to £2.6m today, welcomed the CNP report and its recommendation that national parks are given a leading role by government in recovering nature.

“We should be doing more, we could be doing more, and we’re best placed to do it. Governments just need to back us to do it,” he said. “Since I took over in 2006, I’ve lost a third of my staff. Most of the money we spend on nature recovery, we raise through fundraising, grants and philanthropic donations. If we were relying on core funding alone, we’re resourced to do very little. We don’t have the legal powers to do a lot around nature and yet as place-based organisations with a rich range of relationships built with landowners over decades, we’re best-placed to lead the way. But government aren’t backing us to do that.”

Prof Sir John Lawton, a conservation scientist and the author of an influential government review of how to recover nature in Britain, welcomed “the bold proposals” in the CNP report “to make more space for nature by restoring, recreating, and joining up habitats for the benefit of people and the creatures that live in these beautiful areas”.

“It won’t be easy,” said Lawton. “They are working landscapes, home to people and to wildlife, but the report makes clear how it can be done. Its vision fills me with hope.”

The CNP said it supported the government’s proposals to create more national parks but these must not come at the expense of funding the existing parks. Bradshaw said: “We really need to strengthen the way national parks are run to ensure that they are delivering for nature. Alongside that we should be thinking about places where there’s potential for future new national parks as well. We’re very clear that new national parks should only be introduced alongside increased funding for existing national parks. We certainly wouldn’t want to see new national parks resulting in reduced funding for existing national parks.”

From the moon jellyfish to the humble garden snail, invertebrates play a central – and often invisible – role in shaping our world. Numbering in their millions, species of insects, arachnids, snails, crustaceans, corals, jellyfish, sponges and echinoderms are among the least understood animals on Earth, often overshadowed by their vertebrate cousins.

We asked scientists to tell us about how invertebrates shape our world and structure its ecosystems – and the unforeseen consequences of their disappearance.

‘Nobody likes to step in poo’: decomposing world waste

Without shrimp, dung beetles and thousands of fly species, vast amounts of organic matter would not break down and the nutrients would not be recycled through ecosystems. Many invertebrate species feed and breed in the waste of plants and animals, and play a vital role in their healthy functioning.

“Nobody likes to step in poo when out for a walk and we often complain there is too much about – but things would be far worse without dung beetles and green bottle flies, both of which consume and break down animal poo removing the odour and creating fertiliser for our soils,” says Paul Hetherington, director of Buglife.

In the oceans, mussels, clams and lobsters are all important decomposers, while species such as sea cucumbers also play a role akin to earthworms.

“Burrowing sea cucumber that move through the sediments as part of their daily activities help to oxygenate them, which is important for numerous other processes,” said Annie Mercier, of Memorial University of Newfoundland, and co-chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) species survival commission sea cucumber specialist group. “Sea cucumbers are not only active recyclers, they are prey to many other animals, including crabs, fishes, turtles, sea otters, pinnipeds, eider ducks and more.”

Caffeine-hit blossoms and shrinking pansies: invertebrates shaping the plant world

Bees are famously crucial pollinators of human staples. But beetles, flies and other invertebrates are also essential for helping plants fruit and reproduce. One in every three mouthfuls that humans eat is the result of pollination, researchers estimate. The role of invertebrates shapes the way plants behave and evolve – such as coffee and citrus trees, that give insects a reward in return when they visit their flowers.

“Coffee and citrus flowers produce caffeinated nectar, which has a pharmacological effect on honeybees and bumblebees – it enhances their memory for the unique smells emanating from flowers and so helps the bees find these important food sources in complex floral landscapes,” says Prof Phil Stevenson, head of trait diversity and function at Kew Gardens. “In doing so, it helps the flowers get pollinated as the bees are more likely to return,” he says.

Many plants have evolved to attract particular species of invertebrates, such as prosopanche plants that are native to South America. The group produce heat to woo small nitidulidae beetles to spend the night inside them. When pollinators disappear, it can also change plants – a study in December found French wild pansies were producing smaller flowers and less nectar as pollinator numbers declined, effectively giving up on scarce insects and evolving to self-pollinate, scientists said.

Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at the University of Sussex who specialises in bee ecology, said the disappearance of pollinators was already having dramatic consequences in some parts of the planet.

“In parts of south-western China there are almost no pollinators left, and farmers are forced to hand-pollinate their apples and pears, as otherwise their crops would fail. In Bengal I have seen farmers hand-pollinating squash plants, and reports are coming in of farmers in parts of Brazil resorting to hand-pollinating passion fruits,” he wrote in his recent book Silent Earth.

Breaking down plastic waste

Invertebrates could help break down some of the billions of tonnes of plastic waste that humans produce every year. In 2022, researchers found that the larvae of the Zophobas morio, a beetle species, were capable of digesting polystyrene and successfully completed their lifecycle.

“Within 48 hours … the faeces they produce turn from their usual brown – when they eat bran – to white,” said Dr Chris Rinke of the University of Queensland, a co-author of the study.

Architects of the coral reefs

More than half a billion people depend on reefs around the world for food, protection and their livelihoods. They are natural barriers to storms, flooding and erosion, safeguarding human settlements, while also providing a home for thousands of fish species. Invertebrates are crucial reef builders, but they are threatened by the climate crisis.

“Reef-building hard corals are the architects of coral reefs – they create the physical structure of a reef as new corals grow on the skeletons of dead corals. On a diverse reef, the growing and eroding matrix of old and new skeletons results in complex structures and spaces, creating three-dimensional habitat for the myriad species living on a reef,” says David Obura, founding director of Cordio east Africa and head of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Corals are not the only reef-building animals, says Julia Sigwart, a member of the IUCN species survival commission mollusc specialist group, who warns that marine invertebrates risk being overlooked.

“Marine invertebrate animals comprise the vast majority of the species diversity in the ocean, including many species that are not yet described or named. Because they are not so familiar to us humans, we often lump groups together; many people do not realise that sponges are animals, let alone that there are thousands of different species,” she says “This leaves a huge risk that species are going extinct before we even know that they are there, with surprising and potentially disastrous consequences.”

Upturning predator food chains

The spread of invasive invertebrates can have major consequences for the whole ecosystem. In January, a study found that the arrival of invasive big-headed ants in Kenya had set of an ecological chain reaction that led to lions making fewer zebra kills. Tree cover had fallen in areas where the big-headed ants had spread, providing less cover for lions to ambush zebras. Researchers said their findings had a global lesson about the importance of invertebrates.

“Although ants might seem small and unimportant, for holding together entire ecosystems this couldn’t be further from the truth. This recent study shows that native mutualistic ants are the fabric that holds together the African savanna,” says evolutionary biologist Dr Corrie Moreau, an expert on ants at Cornell University’s Moreau lab.

“When the native ants are displaced from their plant partners by invasive species this causes ripple effects across the entire landscape,” she says. “It is amazing to think that the small but mighty ant can influence the diets of top predators.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features