Pond Creatures

Urban Outdoors | FIND Iowa
Dec 3, 2024 | 00:02:52
Question:

What might you notice if you took a close look at a pond or grassy area near where you live?

The water at Nahant Marsh is home to a wide variety of fish, insects, other animals and plants. Check out some of the unique creatures that can be found! What might you be able to find near you if you stopped and looked closely?

Transcript

Jimmy Wiebler: 

The marsh is just like any other wetland. The marsh is a living ecosystem. There's bugs out there, and those bugs eat other bugs, and things eat those bugs. So everything in nature is connected to make a healthy ecosystem. So this is a dragonfly nymph. This is what dragonflies look like before they're an adult and they're flying around the water. They start off their life in the water. And they are scary looking, but they're actually harmless. They don't bite or anything like that; but this is what a dragonfly would look like when it's a baby. This is a ghost shrimp, and these guys are jumpers. They get the name ghost shrimp because they're completely see-through. That makes them really cool! They actually can eat duckweed, which is these little tiny green plants that are on my fingers right now. You can actually see that in their digestive system, so it's really cool to find ghost shrimp to kind of see what they've been eating inside their bodies. We've got an orb snail that we found in the marsh. We have different types of snails, but this one is curly-cue shaped, so that's how I know it's an orb snail. This is called a back swimmer. He's actually swimming on his back right now. But if we were to turn him over, he would be mostly white and they would have red eyes. So those guys can actually bite, so we won't handle him today. They have very long, paddle-like arms and they are predators, so they can swim through the water looking for something small to eat like another insect. Here we go. If you look really closely you can see a damselfly perched on a leaf. Damselflies are similar to dragonflies but with some differences. They are much skinnier, they have skinnier abdomens than dragonflies, and when they're adults they hold their wings back, closed like a book. Dragonflies hold their wings out flat. But in the water, damselflies start off their life in the water just like dragonflies do, but damselflies, they have three tails, and there's one swimming around here, and you can only really  see their tails when they're swimming around. A marsh is a place where plants and animals can live happily together.

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