One of our assignments this week was to find an object in nature that we could not identify. As a plant person, it was difficult for me to find a plant that I did not recognize as I walked around the nature center yesterday. The boy scout troops were learning about nature at the nature center and once they abandoned their nets, my son and I went to check out the pond.
I am not an expert on aquatic insects and I know from previous times when my son and I have skimmed ponds, we have found some interesting organisms. We were certainly rewarding yesterday as we found a mystery object. This is some type of light yellow gelatinous egg sac. There were a number of these on the bottom of the pond. The pond was very small, maybe 10 x 12 and it is lined with running water that flows into it.
We used the nets to retrieve this egg sac. Then we photographed it and returned it back to the pond. As you can see the organisms developing in this egg sac were around a centimeter long, black in color, and they look like long grains of wild rice. I hope you can help identify our mystery photo.
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| Mystery egg sac found in a small pond at Runge Nature Center on April 19, 2014. |
I may be completely wrong on this, but as I was looking at pictures online, these eggs you found kind of look like salamander eggs. Your pictures shows the same type of "jelly mass" you see with salamanders. I can't really tell in the picture, but salamander eggs will get algae growing inside of them as well. They lay their eggs in ponds like you described.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to show this photo to the folks who work at the nature center. Maybe they have some ideas.
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