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| Mosquito larvae and what appears to be a pair of small leaches on the peak of the rock! |
There’s a small depression in Shade Rock at Mink Bay that (when the lake drops low enough to expose it) fills with water. The other day while looking into it I realized that it was absolutely packed with mosquito larvae. The larvae are tiny little aquatic critters that wriggle around in the water, mostly vertically oriented. I captured a video of the squigglies bouncing around.
These are likely the Asian tiger mosquito larvae. These are the big pain-in-the-butt mosquitoes. Unlike our native mosquitoes, these gals – or the adults at least – feed on blood during the day in addition to at dawn/dusk. Eggs are laid as rafts on the surface of stagnant water. Asian tiger mosquitoes can also successfully develop as larvae in very small patches of water (like a small layer of water caught in a gutter or at the bottom of a 5-gallon bucket), so they readily thrive in urban areas with lots of small impervious surfaces. Once the eggs hatch, the aquatic larvae begin feeding on just about anything that’s small, algae, bacteria, and other microscopic organisms. Below is a crummy and short video of the larvae wriggling around in the water.
