Wednesday, 5 October 2016

Swimming Bugs

We have an old washing-up basin round the back of the house which we use for cleaning plant pots and other garden things. In the past we've found odd beasties swimming around in it, including a small newt, but it didn't have anything in it yesterday. This morning it was populated by....

....these bugs.

One possibility is that they are the shrimp-like things that inhabit seaweed rotting along the high-tide mark. Yesterday I brought up a couple of buckets of this seaweed for the vegetable garden, but it was almost immediately dug into the beds, and the bowl is some 30m away from them, downhill and down a small cliff.
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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous5 October 2016 at 15:02

    yes, they look like sea slaters

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  2. Jon5 October 2016 at 19:05

    Thank you - but it is a mystery to me how they managed to travel so far. Jon

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  3. Derryck Morton6 October 2016 at 06:43

    Sorry anonymous, they are Talitrus saltator, a species of sand hopper. Their hopping motion explains how they got into the bowl but not why there are so many! Jon, maybe all the seaweed you bring into the garden has formed a terrestrial community of hoppers and at night, your garden is a riot of hopping frenzy.

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