The planktonic activity in the pond seems to have reduced considerably with the shorter days and lower temperatures but we found some new activity in Moss Island. Well, it's a piece of moss off the porch roof, inverted into a petri dish to which I keep adding some rain water so that there's a ring of water round the lump of moss.
This has given me a chance to see some creatures not, so far, seen in the pond. For example:
It has 8 legs, crawls very slowly and likes to dwell at the boundary twixt water and "dry" land. Slightly hairy back. Some sort of mite, I think, but not positively identified.
Bdelloid
Rotifer. Lots of these, anchored to the moss or looping their
way to a new patch. A still picture doesn't do them justice but
who's going to download the 92 M byte video clip I captured? Those
twin "rotors" shift quite a lot of water, bringing with
it some food and quite a few larger objects that either escape
or are carefully rejected by the rotifer.
Something
has built this little tube of moss leaf bits. In fact, something
had cut off many of the leaves of the moss and they lay on the
floor of the petri dish with rotifers attached. I haven't found
an occupant of this tube. Maybe it didn't like the neighbours
- a very active collection of what I call hair-worms, though I
may be wrong.
After 2 days the growth of filaments of
alga is causing problems to traffic! The spidery things seem to
find these filaments quite hard to deal with. Several dead ones
are becoming wrapped in its strands, as has a dead bee.
|
|
|