Springtails

In my last post about “pond life” I had been wondering what these small pink critters were and after some more research I finally reached the conclusion that they could be springtails.

The first time I heard about springtails is only some years ago after I joined Flickr. As I love macro photography I joined some of the macro groups and that’s where I saw pictures of them.

It’s hard to find them in real life, because they are so tiny. So sometimes – as with the pond pictures – I only see them on my pictures later on my laptop. As in these ones ……

Can you see him? On the top of the leaf?

But sometimes I find them crawling around on some old leaves……

Here you can watch a little video I made a few years ago of one of them.

The thing is, even if you hardly ever see them – and a lot of people might have never even heard about them – there are thousands of them in a square meter of ground. And as we have seen, some of them also live on the surface of water. So this shows again: there is sooooo much to explore and learn, but we shouldn’t forget to keep our eyes (and ears and other senses) open!! 🙂