Three Frogs and The Scrimblos

Photos taken:
Multiple dates
Late summer to early autumn

Over the summer I set up a small drinking station in the garden! Bugs need to drink water too and considering how hot it was this year it made sense to give them a regular source they could drink from.

Mine is literally just an old stone bird bath filled up with pebbles for the bugs to land on and some larger rocks for decoration. It's not great and definitely needs a redesign next year, but it was very popular with all sorts of bugs over the summer; wasps and hoverflies in particular were frequently landing and taking a sip.

It also managed to attract wildlife I wasn't expecting, for instance these two new frogs!

I previously mentioned Nena the frog, who I found sunbathing in the middle of the garden, but the most common place to find frogs this year was the drinking station where I regularly found two frogs hanging out.

The first is this one I'm calling Cashew who might be my favourite looking frog of the bunch, his mottled pattern is really nice!

We also have this brown frog who I'm calling Crouton. It's interesting that they are mostly one colour apart from the lighter cream parts around their mouth.

Both of these frogs are much smaller than Nena was which meant they could happily squeeze under the rocks you see in the photos; they seemed to really enjoy hiding there and poking their heads out the water.

As an aside, I'm writing this blog post near the middle of autumn and I just managed to find a fourth frog! Bigger than the pond ones but again smaller than Nena, this one was resting under the leaves of a large thistle we have growing. I only managed to get a few photos because they were very jumpy and didn't like me getting close, but even here you can tell how different the colours and patterns of their skin is to the other frogs. The diversity of all four frogs is really neat!

I'm calling this frog Bunger.

Next up we have these super tiny mystery scrimblos. I started noticing a few black squiggles swimming in the water and after a few days there were suddenly around twenty little creatures wheeling around the pond! They would mostly stay close to the surface of the water and poke their tails out, presumably to breathe, so I'm guessing they were either damselfly or dragonfly nymphs...

At least that's what I initially thought! As I was editing and getting ready to upload this blog post, I came across the news that researchers had captured high-speed footage of mosquito larvae eating prey and lo and behold, it's the scrimblos! They were mosquito larvae the whole time!

I originally had a whole segment about how I thought they had died because they suddenly disappeared and there were scrimblo shaped things floating in the water, but no it turns out mosquito larvae moult and pupate very quickly. For the few weeks I saw them, the scrimblos went from being tiny wiggly things, to larger wiggly things, and then to comma-shaped blobs that just sorta floated around. The comma-shaped blobs is their pupal stage which they stay as for a few days before finally becoming a mosquito, ready to cause a nuisance to someone somewhere.

The way some mosquito larvae hunt is super cool too! They propel their head towards prey at super high-speeds and shovel the poor creatures into their gaping mouth, ready to be shredded to pieces by their brush-like face-thingies. It's the real world equivalent of hungry hungry hippos!

I'm not sure if my mosquito scrimblos can launch their heads like this as they mostly just ate algae off the rocks, but it's absolutely rad to see and I'm glad to have finally identified them. More info in this article (archived here) if you're interested in reading more.

Let's end on something funny:

I've no idea what this bug is and the photo is way too blurry to bother trying to identify it, but it does have the most hilarious face I've ever seen. Why do you look like that little bug? Why is that your face?

I also took this picture of what I think is a different bug — again the photos are too blurry to tell. It's definitely not a pond skater or a water cricket, but it was skating on the surface of the water and it seems to have two wings and a long proboscis meaning it's probably some kind of fly so... maybe it's a mosquito? That would make sense considering the larvae living in the water. Maybe this mosquito was laying new eggs.

I think you can even see some of the mosquito larvae next to the fly, just hanging out under the water. This was taken after the previous picture so they look a bit more developed here, with their abdomen clearly having segments and their tails having developed further. That said, the tails look a lot more fan-shaped here so it's possible this is another creature entirely; again these photos are very blurry.

My first thought was, "perhaps I shouldn't be encouraging mosquitoes to breed in the garden," but contrary to popular belief mosquitoes do actually play an important role in the ecosystem; mostly getting eaten by other creatures, but males do pollinate flowers and their larvae are often preyed on by dragonfly and damselfly nymphs. I wouldn't even be surprised if the frogs had been eating some of the scrimblos tbh, that's probably why they liked resting there.

Cool water to rest in, a nice rock to shade under, and a bunch of free food to eat. Nice.