Tiny things #4

I think this is the final of my "tiny things" posts, but it's a subject that I could probably spend a week on itself: the water in my pond.

More specifically, what's in the pond water. I've been wanting to get the microscope out and take a look for a while, and finally made it happen yesterday.

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Since this is my first look at the inhabitants of the pond that you can't see with a normal camera lens, I'm not going to try to identify any of them. I'm still at the "soaking it all in" stage with this, and I don't want to spend time researching right now.

How about a movie to start with?

I believe that large body is a mosquito larvae "shell", left after the little pest transformed into an adult. It was cool seeing it magnified, but even cooler seeing the little creatures that were apparently feeding upon it.

Here are some images of the shell:

Without doing much research, I know these plentiful animals are Daphnia, or "water fleas":

There was so much more that I wanted to look at, but my time was limited. I wanted to find different types of algae, and discover some other fascinating creatures, some of which I remember from long-ago biology classes.

That will have to wait for another day though. The pond isn't going anywhere, right?

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