Today we added a new pond creature to our list of animals observed through the webcams. Attached to the housing of our pond cam Paul spotted a beautiful green and rather amazing Hydra. On the screen it looks huge but it’s only about a cm in length. Paul has changed the focus of the camera [...]
Punnetts Town presentation on life in a woodland pond - 14th June 2016.
Paul has now repaired and re-sited the underwater cam in the heart of reeds. Installing the camera disturbs a lot of sediments making the water cloudy. The water is beginning to settle and today we were able to see some of the fish swimming past the camera. The large silvery coloured fish are rudd. We also [...]
The heavy rain yesterday evening and duri9ng the night left a few muddy puddles around the reserve. To us it was an inconvenience, wet feet if we did not have boots on. With the school that visited today we had to keep taking our footwear off before we went into the Linklater Pavilion because we [...]
Well done to Punnetts Town for sending in their observations of some fascinating behaviour of pond snails gliding around on the front of the underwater camera on pond cam and also a great close up of a stickleback. (screen shot left) Other observations from Punnetts Town included more stickleback observations in the same pond and also mallard ducks [...]
We are so very sorry that two of our cameras have been down at times or shown poor visibility but we have found this year’s clarity of the water to be quite different which underlines the dynamic nature of these habitats. We have also had sealant problems with one of the camera cases and are [...]
During the school visit pond dipping sessions two schools accidentally caught fish eggs. Adult fish, such as Rudd, often lay their eggs in a clump which sticks to a rock or similar object. It looks like a few fish thought that the wooden structure beneath the pond dipping platform was a safe place to lay [...]
There are many types of flying insects that lay their eggs in ponds and other freshwater habitats. These include mosquitos, gnats and non-biting midges. The eggs hatch and develop into free swimming, some of which we discovered during our pond dipping sessions. In fact one midge larva actually became a flying adult in one of [...]
The beautiful and spectacular dragonflies and damselflies that add a splash of colour to our ponds and ditches in the summer spend most of their lives underwater as a dull brown or greenish nymphs (larva). Why do you think that the nymphs are such a dull colour? We have many damselfly nymphs during the RLL [...]
