20 km south, 40 years back
Today I took the car to the peninsula Vånören – ca 20 km linear distance, ca 35 with the car. I thought, I would experience a new place, but well, I just forgot, that I’ve been there already. Anyway, a nice place with quite different types of landscapes. Forests, shallow bogs, rocky coast, small lakes and big granite rocks.
When I came to a rock pool, I saw the first tadpoles of the year. I kneeled down and had a closer look. After a while I discovered other animals in the shallow and clear water – most of them insect larvas. Some of them I knew, others I had to look up when I was home again.
Here they come:
For an hour I was an eight year old boy again. A boy, that has been loving water and all the small animals in it. When I was a child I had tadpoles, water insects, newts or water snails in big plastic bathtubs in the garden each summer.
Back to present age: I kneeled on the rocks, looked at the tadpoles, the great diving beetle larvae (they look like small aliens) – and the shy caddisfly larvas in their self-made “burrows”.
The photos are not the best – the animals were under water, the camera over water. The refraction of the light made it hard to focus and many photos were blurred. But anyway, it was great fun (beside of the hurting knees kneeling on the rough rocky ground).
One question is still open. Have a look at the 5th photo. What is it?! It floated underwater, was round 15 mm long and almost transparent. I don’t think, it’s an insect, perhaps a fish larva, but I don’t have any clue. If you know, what it is, let me know.
Postscript
Number 5 is a mosquito larva, not one of the biting ones, but probably of the family Chaoboridae. German wikipedia describes the larvae as Glasstäbchenlarven which means “glass rod larvae”. A good description in my opinion.