The monsoon rains have come, and I’ve been spending quite a bit of time watching tadpoles in temporary desert ponds and pools. Most of the pools I’ve found this year have not been in my usual cattle tanks and silty mud puddles. Those sites are mostly dry this year.
Instead, I’m finding Spadefoot tadpoles in slickrock tinajas and plunge pools, places where I didn’t see the tadpoles last year. I’m wondering if, in years of monsoon rains that are heavy enough to fill the cattle tanks and silty pools, the flow of water through the sandstone tinajas is so heavy that it flushes the tadpoles out. Or maybe I just didn’t notice them here last year?
The tadpoles hoover along the edges of the pools and the underside of the water surface. They stir up silt from the bottoms of the plunge pools, turning the water the color and consistency of chocolate milk. They are eating as fast as they can, racing to metamorphose into toads before their puddle-pools dry up and return to cracked mud and bone-dry sandstone.
While I was stretched out on a sandstone ledge above one pool, I felt something crawling on my arm. I flicked it away and it fell into the water. It was a Western Harvester Ant (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis).
A Water Strider immediately darted over and grabbed the Ant.
There is such an abundance of life, so many metabolisms spinning so frantically, in these little pools. And small differences in the pools – their depth, the amount of sediment in them, their exposure to the sun – make huge differences in the communities in the pools. Within 10 yards of my Spadefoot pool, there were other, shallower pools of water. Some were crystal clear, and didn’t seem to have much life in them. Others were bright green, opaque with algae and were seething with the larvae of Diving Beetles. Each pool contains a different world.
I’ve been trying to capture it with my photos, but have yet to show it successfully.
