Pond wrigglers ahoy!

Here is yet another wildlife subject I know I've never dealt with before in over 500 blogs, yet there are squillions of the things in my garden at the moment.

Here they are. They are in a new pond that I dug and filled with water in November, and are hanging out on the underside of the water surface.

They are mosquito larvae! Hmm, probably not what you think of first when planning to attract wildlife to your garden.

But seeing them took me straight back to childhood, when I would marvel at them in the open water butt in the garden, watching them swim-wriggle down into the depths when my shadow was cast over them, and then gently floating back to the surface when they thought the coast was clear.

Here's a couple in as much close-up as my camera could muster. The body part touching the water surface (where there is the dash of white where the water is reflecting the light) is called the siphon - the air tube. The hairy protruberance on the opposite side of the siphon is called the saddle, and then the body and bulging head hangs down into the water. Not especially attractive, I grant you.

But if you go back up to the first photo, you'll see that some are like dark blobs, more like a comma than an exclamation mark in shape. They are the pupae. When you think of butterfly pupae, you think of those inanimate cases, a shell inside which the caterpillar can turn into a mush and then reform as a butterfly. But mosquito pupae can swim-wriggle just as much as the larvae, so they too can dart down into the depths if disturbed.

So some questions come to mind.

1) What are they doing in the water?

2) Does this mean that if you were to dig a pond, your garden will be forever filled with mosquitoes?

And 3) Am I constantly covered in pimples because my garden is stuffed with the things?

1) They are filter feeding, eating protzoans and bacteria and the like. Yum! They might normally turn from egg to larva to pupa to adult in barely a week, but with the water cool, they are likely to take a bit longer.

2) This is the thing I love about wildlife ponds: when they are first dug, they are really just a hole in the ground full of water. Mosquitoes are pioneer colonists, and their presence will help kickstart the pond foodchains. They will be the 'first course' for some of the water beetles and newts and the like that I'm confident will arrive in the spring. Nature will then find its balance, and by the end of Year One I expect I'll rarely see a mosquito larva in the pond ever again.

And 3) These are likely to be the larvae of one of the Culex species of mosquito, only the females bite, and they much prefer to bite birds. (But birds like to bite them back, of course!) So it is very very rare indeed for me to get bitten by them, Indeed, I rarely get bitten by ANYTHING in my wildlife-filled garden. Maybe I'm just not very tasty.

So my little wrigglers are welcome in my garden, knowing that they are the warm-up act for the pondlife explosion that will happen this spring.