I saw something weird last night when we went on our walk just after dark, and this evening decided that it was worth bringing my camera out to get pictures. Not being an entomologist, I see a lot of insect-like things that I can't identify, but having spent as much time as I have looking at and learning about insects, I have picked up enough information to at least guess about a lot of them. These weird things, though, were really confounding. However, I did know enough about them to pick the right search terms to find out what they were, eventually.
Backyard Bugs of the Day:
These, I now know, are blackfly larvae.
When we spotted them last night, this is what we saw. There were several leaves in the stream, underwater, in a spot where the water was flowing over them rather strongly; there are places in the stream that are somewhat still pools by comparison, but this was a place where the water was rushing. It was by one of the bridges, and I knelt down on the bridge to get as close a look as I could, but they are tiny, and I couldn't really tell much about them, other than they looked like larvae of some kind, and they were anchored to the leaf on one end, while their other ends were obviously being tugged by the flow of water over them, waving in the current the same way the mosses and algae do. Today when we went out, we did not see as many, at first, at least not in the exact spot where they had been. The leaves there did not have as many as last night, and my husband was having trouble spotting them, so I poked one of the leaves with a stick to point it out to them, and when I did so, most of the larvae on it curled themselves up in balls and let go, allowing themselves to be taken away by the stream. I found this leaf, though, and went back to get my camera from the house. After I took shots of the leaf in the water, as you see here (you can tell which way the water is flowing, I am sure), I carefully lifted the leaf out of the water onto the bridge for close-up shots. I knew I was going to need close shots to figure out what they were.
They didn't like being out of the water, but they couldn't really go anywhere, I don't think. They moved a bit, but it is obvious that they need the flow of water to really move somewhere. I took some pictures and then put the leaf back in the water. When I did, the stream took the leaf, and many of them curled up and rolled off. From pictures I found when I looked them up it appears that they will be just as happy attached to a rock somewhere, and the stream has plenty of those. My guess was that they anchor themselves to something, and they catch things to eat as the water flows past them, and when I looked that up (after I figured out what they were), the internet confirmed that that is what they do.
They're kind of creepy looking to me. If the warm weather is what brought them out, then I think they are going to find the coming week rather trying. Another thing that I read about them is that they are biotic indicators–if they are found in a stream, the water is clean. I don't really know what clean means in this context, other than probably not polluted by human activities and all the nasty things that people dump in waterways. I don't know the source of my stream because it originates somewhere not on my property, but it is good to know that it is clean enough for these apparently finicky creatures.
Today was at least twenty degrees colder than it's been the last few days. The number of insects to be seen on our walk dropped accordingly. These are the only pictures I took.
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