Sample from new pond: what turned up

[Lilly Begonia]

I was at a pond in a gated community yesterday in Naples, 33 miles south of where I live, and got a sample of it. It turns out to be quite different fauna than what I've found near my house and in the other gated community, or at the lake at RSW. After recovering sufficiently from yesterday's shift I prepared a slide and scanned through it frame-line by frame-line. This is what turned up:

First thing I found:



I believe it's a copepod of some kind.

Then I found a lot of these apparent diatoms in a variety of states:







Then I found this guy, clearly some sort of crustacean and compared to the rest of the life on the slide a real whopper:




The water was just full of these oval dark things that I'm thinking are eggs of some kind. They are too uniform in shape and color to be just dirt.



There were a few of these on the first slide too:



Then I found this cute little creature, which I take to be another kind of water flea:



Then I came across this... well quite strange...copepod? I really don't know. Francisco prolly knows. It seems to have a turtle-like shell and a tail. It was hard to get focus on it for a stack
:

[75RR]

Green thingies are Desmids, last image may well be a country cousin of the Loch Ness monster

[Lilly Begonia]

Green thingies are Desmids, last image may well be a country cousin of the Loch Ness monster

I suppose it could be, I've never seen anything quite like it before, but that's what's so fun about this, that at any moment you can find something you never could have imagined. Could it perhaps be a testate copepod of some kind?

Hey, do you know why those desmids are rupturing and expelling their insides? Could it be from predation of some kind? I've seen this kind of thing in nematodes in other ponds.

Oh, and I just found something else I've never seen before! What is this? A rotifer? How very alien looking!



Oh! And here's a spiffy stellate trichrome I just found! I really like these!


I really really have to do more ponds! I've found entirely different life in each of them, and they are each unique biomes with their own native lifeforms to be found and recorded! They seem to all be different in the life they contain. The Tiburon pond is very different from the RSW lake, or the ponds here on the cape. I need to retire so I can do this!

Okay, what is this? Another thing I've never seen before, and quite interesting. This is also from the Tiburon pond:

[Crater Eddie]

Several nice finds, thanks for sharing them with us. Next time you find one of those desmids, look closely at the tips... often you can see small droplets of oil dancing in them. Some of your images show these droplets, perhaps you didn't notice them. These desmids are rather large, perhaps some were damaged while being transferred to the slide, or crushed a bit by the cover glass, causing them to rupture and spill their insides.
CE

[Bruce Taylor]

Good haul. The "whopper" is an amphipod, the "water flea" is another copepod. The "space alien" is, indeed, a rotifer (a brachionid, I think...not sure, I usually ignore rotifers ).

[75RR]

Last one looks like a Statoblast

[Lilly Begonia]

Good haul. The "whopper" is an amphipod, the "water flea" is another copepod. The "space alien" is, indeed, a rotifer (a brachionid, I think...not sure, I usually ignore rotifers ).

Yes Bruce I was thinking copepod for the water flea too because of it's tail. Amphipod is a class of animal I've yet to delve into, but it's really interesting. But the space alien, I'm not sure. I'm thinking it's a copepod that can generate it's own shell just like a testate amoeba... but I could of course be wrong.

[Lilly Begonia]

Last one looks like a Statoblast

Oh! Statoblast! I love it! What a great name! Right out of Fireball XL 5 in the 60's! I am intrigued by it's shell and the purpose of it's structure, particularly the dark bits in it toward the bottom, but what I'm most curious about is the two-legged horned rotifer that looks like a micro-Satan. What is that?

[Lilly Begonia]

Several nice finds, thanks for sharing them with us. Next time you find one of those desmids, look closely at the tips... often you can see small droplets of oil dancing in them. Some of your images show these droplets, perhaps you didn't notice them. These desmids are rather large, perhaps some were damaged while being transferred to the slide, or crushed a bit by the cover glass, causing them to rupture and spill their insides.
CE

Oh gosh! It's my fault they are rupturing? Bummer! Rather a frisbee to the head here... I didn't mean to hurt them I just wanted to see them...

[actinophrys]

The first image is indeed a copepod, and in particular a nauplius larva, an early stage with only three pairs of appendages. The desmids are Closterium. The statoblast is from a plumatellid – these are their resting stages, much like asexual eggs, with the little polygons around the outside acting as floats for dispersal.

The larger crustacean is like Bruce says a freshwater amphipod; for North American genera I think the little abdominal spines and lack of branches on the antennae mark it as Hyalella. You can see its digestive tract contains dark compacted material, which is a likely source for your ovals.

I think he is also right about your rotifer, which I'd say was Brachionus. Some have only short projections on the front, but others have long spines just like this, varying not just by species but by the amount of predators in the environment. It looks like it is mostly only the shell though; you can see a notch for the foot, but the foot itself and organs appear missing.

[Lilly Begonia]

The first image is indeed a copepod, and in particular a nauplius larva, an early stage with only three pairs of appendages. The desmids are Closterium. The statoblast is from a plumatellid – these are their resting stages, much like asexual eggs, with the little polygons around the outside acting as floats for dispersal.

The larger crustacean is like Bruce says a freshwater amphipod; for North American genera I think the spines and lack of branches on the antennae mark it as Hyalella. You can see its digestive tract marked out by compact dark material, which is a likely source for your ovals.

I think he is also right about your rotifer, which I'd say was Brachionus. Some have only short projections on the front, but others have long spines just like this, varying not just by species but by the amount of predators in the environment. It looks like it is mostly only the shell though; you can see a notch for the foot, but the foot itself and organs appear missing.

Well bless you sir! Thank you so very much for that! Now I have information to go digging with.The rotifer had movement inside it while I was viewing it live, so I don't think it's just a shell, rather in a resting state like most rotifers I've seen. It's been quite rare for me to find a rotifer going about it's life business and moving about. Like the water bears most of them are just sleeping.

So, those dark ovals could have come from this Amphipod as excrement?

[actinophrys]

Yes, I think so. As for the movement in the rotifer, your close-up shows some little ovals on mostly the right side, and I expect these would be scavenging protozoa. They can often be seen inside dead rotifers and arthropods where there is a tougher lorica or exoskeleton left behind. You can expect dormancy in bdelloid rotifers, which like tardigrades form tuns surviving very harsh conditions, but in these other kinds it only occurs in resting eggs (per Ricci, 2001).

[Jonnyvine]

Good findings