You may have noticed through our pond cam that there are lots of tiny creatures swimming about. Most of these are tiny freshwater crustaceans called daphnia and cyclops. These tiny creatures are very important as they are food for many of the fish, newts and other animals that live in pond.
As the pond water receives more sunlight and the water starts to warm, the underwater world bursts into life.
However these are not the smallest living things in the pond, daphnia and cyclops feed on even smaller animals and plants, some of them are made up of only 1 cell. That's so tiny you cannot see them without a powerful microscope.
There single celled plants can even swim! In spring these tiny plants multiply rapidly in the pond - which is why pond water sometimes looks very green. With all this food plant food to eat, tiny animals also grow to feed on them. The larger animals such as the daphnia and Cyclops grow to fed on them all.
Daphnia and Cyclops are only a few millimetres long!
In the video below you can see lots of tiny green single celled plants swimming around in a drop of pond water. They were filmed using a powerful microscope.
