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nymph This is a dragonfly nymph. It turned up in the small tank, which had a couple of bits of bogwood and some plants in it - I think it must have got in when very small with a new plant - I find it hard to imagine that a dragonfly laid eggs in a tank with a hood on it, never mind in dead of winter. I was breaking the tank down when I found it; I'd taken out plants and a fair few fish and was moving the bogwood. The lights were out in the tank as the hood was off, and as I picked up the bogwood, a great shadowy THING like an aquatic spider from mars detached itself from the wood, sank to the sandy substrate and disappeared. I had absolutely no idea of what it might be and am ashamed to say I removed the rest of the wood with the aid of a knitting needle and ended up chasing a large, fast black insect around the tank with a net. There was aso an outgrown skin, including legs, which was much easier to catch as well as being quite amzingly complete. I caught the nymph itself when it tried to bury itself headfirst in the sand and I put it in a jamjar with some sand from the tank - as in the picture above. I didn't want to put it back into the new tank, as it was as big if not bigger than the smallest fish and these nymphs are predatory - and also because there would be nowhere for it to go when it needed to climb out of the water and climb out of its skin for the last time. So now the nymph lives here:  which is the same jam jar, with gravel, a bit of free-floating hornwort, duckweed and some bits of old coral (we've got high pH but very soft water and the coral adds hardness to help keep the pH stable. I have no idea if aquatic invertebrates are as sensitive to pH crashes as fish are, but I had some old coral kicking about and it seemed a sensible precaution). There's also an aquatic grass of some sort, with the roots and bottom part of the stem submerged and enough sticking out for the adult to emerger, I hope. The environment, amazingly, is stable. Enough nitrifying bacteria must have come in with the sand and pebbles to deal with any waste, and the plants seem to be soaking up any nitrates pretty well. It's a pretty small bioload, so a jam-jar looks just about big enough! I'm not sure what the nymph was eating in the tank, I've only ever seen it eat live daphnia in here [note to self - must remember to see if I can photograph it eating, the jaws are big and scary...]; it won't even touch frozen live foods. I'm not sure either how old it is, how big it will get before it emerges from the water or how long that will take - I think it could be years! I will see if the British Dragonfly Society can offer any advice. If you're interested, they have a lovely website, which is here (this will open in a new window): http://www.dragonflysoc.org.uk/ Further photos of the nymph are below - I will try to keep adding anything interesting, though as it doesn't like light its hard to get anything which isn't backlit. The flash is obviously a huge problem (look at those enormous eyes!) so I don't really like to use it much.      |