This selection of images highlights the daily rituals performed by invertebrates, the risks they face just to survive and the astonishing ways in which they have adapted to fill niches. Please see individual captions within images.
A male resin bee clings tightly onto a female, to prevent any other males from being able to wrestle her away from him.
A Bee-wolf, heavily laden with its honeybee prey, rests on a human's boot whist she locates her nest hole.
This braconid wasp developed inside the caterpillar it's now hanging off. It waits for a female to emerge from the cocoon.
A worker Yellow Meadow Ant urgently moves a larva to safety following disturbance of the soil around its nest.
Insect wings are delicate; even air movement causes damage, but this battered Chalk-hill Blue is still, somehow, able to fly.
A male spider tentatively extends a pedipalp to transfer his sperm sac over to the female. He offers two gifts in one, as he will probably be eaten.
A social wasp raids an abandoned spider web for a the leftovers of a blowfly.
This Common Darter has sustained significant damage across her face, possibly from a bird attack.
A dung fly sucks the innards from another, smaller fly.
Mating misfire. Sex doesn't come naturally to everyone.
Usually the predator, a social wasp has met its match as it now becomes the meal of an orb-weaver spider.
This bee has to forage with the carcass of an over-tenacious red ant forever clamped to its leg.
Failure to Launch: Pupation is risky - not all wings inflate properly. This conopid fly cannot, well, fly.
