Tadpoles!

My most favorite animals are tadpoles. I love them because they are the craziest critters. Going from fish-like to frog-like is a heck of a feat. I don' think the future is bright for the guys who were laid in the scuzzy ditch, there are are just too many things that want to feed on them right now. 

I saw a nesting hummingbird chase of a scarlet tanager from the bird watering table. I can't see the three tadpole I put in there to control the algae, either they got predated, or they are very good at camouflage. I did notice elm seeds sprouting in the water, though.

This moth looks a little banged up, note the bald spot over the shoulder

The summer amphibian season has started.

This little tough guy reminds me of the cartoon pop-eye with his big arms. He is barely bigger than a full stop at the end of a sentence, but always manages to look bigger.

Weirdly, the mosquito fish seemed to be breeding right alongside the tadpoles. I found some tiny fry in with the netted specimens I found. Thefish pretty much looked like 2 eyes and a backbone inside clear jelly, but they were definitely fish like. The tadpoles have doubled in size in just one day, and are a lot more tadpole like than, say, a comma. I saw a predatory diving beetle resting near the ones in the ditch. It is a common predator of these young.

This is an action shot of a fast moving darkling beetle. La Entrada seems to have very large bug specimens and this guy was not stopping for anybody. Normally they stop and point their stinky rear end in the end if you tap near their snout, but this one was on a mission. I have found the young of this species clustered under leaves in the bosque. The adults are most noticeable up in the sandy desert.

this delicate creature spend it's childhood as the fearsome ant-lion larva, ploughing through loose ground and snatching ants in clever traps. Looks rather dainty here. Unlike the damselflies on the ditch, the wings are not folded up, or spread out like the dragonflies.

An impressive variety of spiders tonight coincided with a decreased in the giant cutworm moths. There was a large number and variety of smaller flying insects like midges and mosquitoes. The bottom spider of this trio is identified by the computer as a false widow. Not so scary in person, I think.