A pond skater’s feet feel prey landing on the drumskin-tight surface of the water. Just how can this skater skate on thin “ice” while a fly the size of its eye falls through? Though the fly tries to drag its legs free, surface tension binds it to a sheet of elastic glue.
I lean forward and the skater darts away in a series of fitful starts. A water measurer beneath my gaze stays put at the pond’s edge. An aquatic stick insect, Hydrometra stagnorum could easily be mistaken for a strand of dark human hair. My eyes are just a handspan away, so I can observe the detail of alternating light and dark strips along its abdomen, which remind me of a ruler. However, it gets its name from the way it walks over the surface with a measured tread.
A movement under the water draws my attention. A blob of a beetle, a black pinhead in motion, bustles about on an important errand. At a more leisurely slide, a type of flatworm called a planarian, looking like an ironed-out tadpole, is oozing by. It meets a grazing ramshorn snail a hundred times bigger, slithers up its face and begins to coil itself around one of the snail’s eye stalks, grazing the grazer. The snail bats an eye, still waving its tentacles as if unencumbered by the planarian, which can only maintain a loose coil, at that moment resembling a curl of grated milk chocolate.
Deeper below, I spot a cyclops, a lifeform so small I can only see its shape, a dot with a tail, jerking erratically.
I am being eyeballed by a newt. There are times when a newt flicks its tail with fishy grace. And there are others when it bobs up like a long-bodied frog. This one gives me a pop-eyed amphibian stare and I look into its inscrutable orbs. The fingers of its weedy arms, held out crab-like, stroke the duckweed. And then, with a quick, deft twist of its head and a body thrust, the carnivorous newt shoots off. I look again to rescue the fly, but it has vanished. I wonder where.
