The NaturePlus Forums will be offline from mid August 2018. The content has been saved and it will always be possible to see and refer to archived posts, but not to post new items. This decision has been made in light of technical problems with the forum, which cannot be fixed or upgraded.
We'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to the very great success of the forums and to the community spirit there. We plan to create new community features and services in the future so please watch this space for developments in this area. In the meantime if you have any questions then please email:
Fossil enquiries: esid@nhm.ac.uk
Life Sciences & Mineralogy enquiries: bug@nhm.ac.uk
Commercial enquiries: ias1@nhm.ac.uk
Could you please advise what these are in my pond there's millions of them and they swarm under torch light.
Are they harmful to anything else in there?
Many thanks we are intrigued.
Hello and Welcome to NaturePlus. These look rather like Water Fleas, or Daphnia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphnia
Not harmful, more likely to be eaten themselves I think.
They are indeed water fleas, though it may be impossible to say whether they're Daphnias
(but https://www.arkive.org/water-fleas/daphnia-spp/image-A21525.html has good pictures)
Although wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladocera has water fleas as an order of crustaceans, there's been a reclassification making Cladocera a superorder,containing 4 orders & the order Anomopoda = water fleas https://www.britannica.com/animal/water-flea
According to http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artjun99/wflea.html there are about 80 species of freshwater waterfleas in Britain, (though many are rare).
Very many thanks all for your answers. I apologise for not responding sooner, I've had a bit of problem with accessing this site. I am also unsure how to delete my duplicate post.
It has been very interesting finding out what the critters are. Hopefully they'll keep our newt's tummies full for a while.
We do also have mosquito larvae but they are quite different to the water fleas.
Kind regards
Elaine
Concerning you're other post http://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/thread/38119 Iit apparently can only be deleted once mine & flecc's comments have been deleted, which we've now done, so you should be able to delete it.