Predator and Prey Video

Well this is new to me editing my video clips. I've now identified the prey, its a Cypris,a freshwater Ostracod crustatian."Like the copepods, the ostracods are very numerous in both freshwater and marine environments. There are 2000 living species. The larger marine species are also known as mussel shrimps or seed shrimps, but the freshwater ostracods are usually smaller than a millimetre.
There are 10,000 or so fossil species dating from the Late Cambrian period (about 500 million years ago) to recent times. Their great abundance and widespread distribution have made them useful index fossils for dating marine sediments, notably in oil exploration.

In freshwater ponds they are usually found scuttling around among the submerged plants and debris at the shallow edges, and less commonly in the open waters. They swim smoothly with appendages extended from between the two halves of their carapace. When disturbed, they withdraw their limbs and clamp the halves of their tiny shells tightly together".
read on>> Above the castoff shells of the ostracod


See Movie

Predators

Predators must have started their evolution soon after life was first established in the primeval soup with the primitive bacteria devouring plastid and mitochondria carrying entities.It evolved from the minute to the gigantic extinct dinosaurs and the largest killer whales or orcas which are still with us. These water beetle larva perform just like a fox terrier or a cat foraging after a mouse. Burrowing into the debris and rootlets of the duck weed in the petri dish with considerable aggression and energy.The action is the same though there are six legs instead of four. One could almost imagine them thinking. Their prey some unidentified spherical animals.All the predators have their niches and the prey fits the size of the predators. If the predator is very small and the prey large then I suppose it becomes a parasite. That's a bit rough and derogatory.






See the video of the attack. Just like a lion grabs a wildebees by its throat and suffocates it until its dead, this predator held the prey until it was dead before eating it.

A Water Bug

This little bug,possibly a water bug nymph, appeared on the surface of the water in a petri dish with water from the pond and duck weed . It is barely visible to the naked eye. Less than 1mm. It runs all over the surface of the water stopping to clean itself every now and again. It has a long, what looks like a sucking proboscis.At first I thought it was the water beetle but the larva is still there and very much bigger,7mm with other small ones now present.The pond is man made and there must be very few ponds occurring naturally in New Zealand like this one, so where does all this life come from? The pond though is 150 years old.

Water Beetle

This guy looks like a water beetle larva to me. Well it looks like the one in the beautiful book 'African Insect Life"I've handled him so much I hope he survives till he pupates. It is about 5mm long at present and I have watched it since I first spotted it when it was about 2mm long. It has pretty lethal mouth parts and I have watched it attack and devour tiny as yet unitentified spherical animals that flit around in the water.

Backswimmer or Waterboatman

I found this little fellow on the side of the glass container, about 2.5 cms in length. It is one of the numerous species found in the pond


Class: Insecta
Order: Hemiptera
Sub Order: Heteroptera
Family:Cryptocerata
Genera:Notonectidae

This is how I have identified it as best I can at this stage. Backswimmers are aquatic predators. Or maybe it has me fooled and its a waterboatman. It could be either because when it swims it does not seem to swim on its back.

Pigeonsence

The dear doctor who lived here at the 'The Pines'in the nineteenth century,long before there were automobiles or proper roads, used pigeon post . On his journeys into the countryside the doctor would take pigeons to leave with his patients so they could let him know of their progress. The pigeon house eventually disintrigated and has been replaced by a replica. Some of the present pigeons may even be decendants. Well they are part of this artificial ecology surrounding my pond and can often be
seen sunbathing and drinking.

I have always been very fond of pigeons as when I was a boy of ten I constructed a pigeon coup and hoped one day to race them. This never happened,because later when at about sixteen my father was transferred. I was at boarding school and it was a very sad situation having to get rid of all my homing pigeons. On returning to school after the holidays I hid a baby squeeker under my jersey and boarded the train for the overnight journey.I fed it by chewing the grain and then feeding the bird from my mouth until it was able to fend for itself. I made a box for it and put it on top of the book cupboard in the house commonroom.This was its refuge for the next few months till the end of the year. I settled for the name 'choccy' because of its colour. Well as the weeks went by Choccy became stronger and was able to fly and spent most of the time outside returning at night to its box. I though nothing strange about it at the time but no matter where I was outside he was able to find me and would swoop down and come and sit on my shoulder, picking me out from the other boys. His antics amused every one, sometimes disrupting assembly by making pigeon noises while perched high up on the hall cinema screen or flying down onto the table during exams,and strutting around on one of the tables examining the pencils.

Well eventually the year ended and I travelled with the family to a holiday resort by the sea. His box was nailed to a beam under the eave near my room and that became his home for the next few weeks, flying around and returning at night. All good things come to an end and I was forced to leave the pigeon there as we were to go to live for a while in a city hotel.

The Pines Pigeons were fed every evening in their house but one evening I forgot and several of them came and sat on the roof all facing and staring at me until I got the message. They had never sat on the roof before as their house is very much higher up on a hill.

Pigeons have an intelligence and concienceness that we will never know. they know things we can never understand and it is arrogant of us to think humans are the only ones with intelligence and that animals only have instincts.