Pond Snails

Photos taken:
July

I visited my Nan and Auntie a little while back and they had just set up a small pond in their garden, complete with a few pond snails. Here's a few pictures of them:

The first snail that came up to the water's surface was Spiral, who is probably a Great Pond Snail (Lymnaea stagnalis). There are two of this species in the pond (or at least there were two, keep a few snails together and they will very quickly start laying hundreds of eggs) but I only got to see Spiral as the other snail tends to stay deeper down at the bottom of the bowl.

Photo of a snail's shell poking out of the water. The shell is light-grey in colour and is a long spiral shape.

Spiral didn't come up to the surface much either tbh, but I did manage to get one macro image of them. Here you can see a nice close-up of their shell (which already seems to have algae growing on it) and one of their tentacles poking out from underneath.

Close up of the same snail's body. It is mostly dark but with some bright speckles covering it.

Unlike their terrestrial relatives, aquatic snails usually do not have eyes at the end of their tentacles instead having small photo-receptive cells near its base, which I think you can see in this next image!

Another snail with a rounder shell that has a small blunt spiral at the end. These snails have two long tentacles at the top of their heads which vaguely look like bunny ears. At the base of these tentacles are two small dots which are the snail's eyes.

This is Houdini! He's probably a Wandering Pond Snail (Ampullaceana balthica) or possibly the similar-looking Ear Pond Snail (Radix auricularia). I'm guessing the former though because at one point he was found outside the pond on the surrounding rocks, which is how he got the name Houdini and is also why this species is described as "wandering"; they're often gliding around outside the waters they live in.

Image of Houdini grazing on the pond weeds near the surface of the water.

The perspective on this image is a bit weird. Houdini was under the water's surface here and I took this photo at an angle so everything looks a bit flattened.

Photo of Houdini coming out of the water.

And finally, here's Houdini poking out of the water. His shell has a nice spotty pattern at the front!

I didn't take many other bug photos on the day but I did find what might be a flying ant? It was moving very fast and tunnelling into the soil so none of the photos were particularly clear, but I'm pretty sure this is an ant.

Two photos of a winged insect with a banded red abdomen. The photos are obscured by grass and don't give a clear view of the bug.

And of course if you leave a stagnant pool of water alone for long enough, everyone's favourite wriggly little guys will show up! It's always a delight to watch mosquito larvae wheel about the water so it was a nice surprise to see them living at my Nan's house too.

Murky image of a mosquito larvae. They are a small aquatic creatures with short round heads and abdomens, and long tail ends which are sparsely covered in thin spines.