Whitley Bay, North Tyneside: A huge community effort is under way to clear up a spill of these disastrously resilient beads. We take a family trip to the beach to do our bit

My son spots the first one. It’s about the size of a lentil, and half-buried in the dry sand.

We’re on the beach at the seaside town of Whitley Bay. We’ve just walked past a clean-up crew of about 40 volunteers in hi-vis clothing and rubber gloves, kneeling or stooped over black buckets. This is the aftermath of the Tyne nurdle spill, which sounds much funnier than it is.

The Marches, Shropshire: For this hoverfly, pretending to be far more dangerous than it actually is has been a useful evolutionary technique

Back in the analogue world – where “analogue” means signals transmitted by continuous waves of sound or light, but also means something that looks like something else – intelligence is more poetic and weirder than its shambling digital doppelganger.

In a bend of the heatwave, a remarkable fly lands on a rose leaf in full sun. The hornet mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, is a stonking great (for a hoverfly) 2cm-long creature with a peachy-yellow and black striped abdomen. It has no sting, a chestnut thorax and a big-eyed head with a pad for nectar, not jaws for chomping insects, two rather than four cellophane wings folded at rest, and an aura to unnerve the uninitiated.