Spprrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinggg!!!
Temperatures in the 50'sF this afternoon, bright and sunny so I went searching for frogs. Didn't even need a coat! The ponds were still frozen, all I heard was one very sleepy chorus frog cree-ee-eeking, but one of the little spring ponds had melted on the edge where the sun was shining and I found FAIRY SHRIMP!!! SPRING REALLY IS COMING!!! It shouldn't surprise me because of course it does, every year, but when there is confirmation like sunshine that feels warm and fairy shrimp swimming and sandhill cranes migrating and male salamanders leaving their offerings of sperm-on-jelly in the ponds (which will probably happen on Thursday, when it's supposed to rain) I'M ALWAYS SURPRISED!
For the weekend: temperatures in the 20'sF and snow, and even I, lover of precipitation in whatever form it cares to assume, sigh at that forecast. Just a little. Because spring IS coming, I believe it now *frolics about*
Fairy shrimp, if you're not familiar with them, are aquatic crustaceans, relatives of lobsters and crabs and the brine shrimp or sea monkeys they sell sometimes as pets. They live in freshwater vernal ponds - ponds that dry up every summer. The eggs survive in the soil, and hatch when the pond fills up again in late winter/early spring. This early in the year the shrimp are only 4mm in length (those big sticks in the first video are actually blades of grass) - they'll eventually reach about 20-30mm, mate, scatter their eggs over the pond bottom, and die sometime in April. I think they are the awesomest things in the universe.
Click to viewHere they are against a white background, where you can really see their color, and their little eyeballs *coos* Later in the year some of them I find are blue or green, which is apparently due to diet. The other small dark beasties swimming about are mostly copepods, another teeny aquatic crustacean.
Link to more stuff about fairy shrimp:
www.vernalpool.org/inf_fs.htm