A tray of pond olive larvae
This tray is full of pond olive mayfly larvae from my pond. Almost every blob is an animal (click the picture for a closer view). It’s the result of three or four sweeps of the sieve in the grasses at the edge of the pond.
The quiz is – how many are there!
Pond Olive mayfly larva
Answer in a week or so (which is about how long its going to take me to count them!).
The pond olive is one of the most widespread of pond animals – you can see it in about two thirds of all ponds. The adult mayflies have flown to the pond – I don’t know how far they’ve flown or where they came from but I definitely didn’t add them (or anything else). They have been abundant from the early days – they colonised 2 months after the pond filled.
Most people think mayflies only live for a day – buit the larvae are under water for months before the adult emerges.
Although almost everything in the tray is a pond olive, sharp-eyed entomologists may notice two larvae of another type of insect.
Tags: Pond animals
October 6, 2008 at 9:55 am |
I recon there are 123 pond olive mayflies. Am I right? What is the prize?
May 3, 2009 at 9:00 pm |
[...] The first pond has probably thousands of larvae of this animal – click here to see a tray full I photographed last year. [...]
June 14, 2009 at 9:08 pm |
I am guessing the two extra are damselfly larvae (two different kinds) and diving beetle larvae