Is that just in the water or out of it?
The sub-habitats for this project are for out of the water, Zo.
Have a look through the project. You can click on it on the right-hand side menu on the site Home page.
Projects eventually disappear as new ones get put on. This one’s at the top of the list at the mo.
Jane
My creeping Jenny has got longer and is growing faster than the watercress. But it hasn’t got any flowers yet
I have got a problem with my wildlife pond. Im glad iv got something in my pond even if it is just gnat or mosquito larvae it’s better than nothing in my pond. But there is algae growing On the walls of my pond in the water. How do I get rid of the algae?
And secondly there’s more than 30 larvae in the pond should I try to control some of the numbers by encouraging some predators of knat larave or taking some out with my net or should I just leave them be
Water beetles will come and control the larvae.
How long does it usually take for them to come along?
When they start to run out of food in the pond they are in earlier they fly to another pond.
There are other insects with predatory larvae too.
Have a look at what happened in this pond.
Iv got those circles aswell there are also dots of things that looked like bits of leafs or soil and other things in the water but when I tryed to scoop it up it wasn’t bits of leafs and stuff. I also have those circles you mentioned I wondered what they are so I scooped it up with my net and it was a load of larvae they all started moving around alot as if restless so I poured it back in. I also saw something walking along a stone under the water but that could of been a woodlouse since they drown in my pond
The walker is more likely to be a predator of the larvae.
If it likes your pond it will attract a mate and breed.
You can get chemical treatments for algae. You can also fish it out if there are mats of it. The best control is probably to plant things that hide some (but not all!) of the water from direct sunlight. I read somewhere that you should aim to have about 1/3 of the pond surface as clear water. Sadly, with our rampant water lilies, we have hardly any open water - and consequently not many dragonflies (though plenty of damselflies).
It’s about 12 sq. meters.
Thanks. Mine doesn’t have anything covering it at the moment the whole water is exposed to the sun except underneath the creeping Jenny on the other side that is starting to spread across the water it’s been sunny for more than a couple of days so that could be why the algae developed. I havnt been able to get the water forget me not yet but when I do hopefully it will help.
I think that is Asellus aquaticus. It’s a detritivore, so not a parasite as far as we know…
Ok. cause he said that if it is a ground crawler it’s probably a predator I was just wondering if this example was a predator then in that case. I wasnt wondering if it was a parasite as such but just if it is a predator in general cause for me this is the first time iv ever made a wildlife pond iv been looking through the water hoping to see a predator to control the numbers I just wondered weather it would be a predator or not since I havnt seen any predators yet and it feels like it’s taking forever for them to turn up
it definitely feels like it’s taking a very long time for sure and there’s more Knat larvae than there was originally now I can’t count the ones that are under water but have counted as much as I can above the water and knats are still going for splashes occasionally which I’m guessing must be egg laying
I don’t have a problom with the Knat larvae in the water but there needs to be a predator or something to control the numbers cause there covering most of the pond and at the moment there isn’t
I don’t know how sensible it is but when we first made our pond we got a bucket of water from a nearby stream to ‘kick-start’ the process.
We live under the flight path into Gatwick Airport, so I think we have a layer of aviation fuel on our pond. It might explain why we get very few mosquitos or knats - though we do seem to get the non-biting midges.
Maybe. My pond is very out in the open and not near an airport. There can be helicopters looking for people if there has been an accident or something so go round the area over and over occasionally but not on a regular basis and do sometimes get planes like green ones or red ones come over but luckily Exspeacially for me cause of my hypersensitive hearing that is part of my Autism it’s only very occasionally. Usually it’s quiet planes flying up exstremly high in the sky more often but I don’t get planes come over as often as if I was in close proximity to an airport. The garden is built up to a certain exstent cause it’s got a wall that goes all the way around but the pond is on the side that gets sunlight almost all day so the water goes down quickly on warm and sunny days which is usually when the knats are even more active cause it’s warmer. So it could be cause I’m not near one like you said. Or at least one of the reasons