Here’s something I’ve not seen before – a Water Strider scavenging on a dead Tiger Salamander larva.
I was photographing Tiger Salamander larvae at one of my local ponds a couple of days ago (2023-07-31). This site is in a Ponderosa Pine forest in Southwestern Colorado, at about 7800′. There were a lot of Salamander larvae in the pond, and they mostly looked pretty good – swimming, foraging, etc.
There were, however, 8-10 dead larvae visible in the water. Some were floating on the surface, others were dead on the bottom of the pond.
I’ve seen die-offs in this tank before, and I’m not sure what causes it. It might be related to the nutrient levels in the water from cattle grazing – the water smells pretty manure-y. It could also be a pathogen of some sort, or some other cause. I’m not sure.
I photographed a Water Strider that was standing over one of the floating Tiger Salamanders corpses. It stayed on the corpse for at least a five minutes. I was mostly interested in getting a better view of the round lesion on the Tiger Salamander’s chest and I wasn’t paying much attention to the Water Strider.
When I got home and looked more closely at the photos, I saw that the Water Strider appeared to have its sucking mouth parts piercing the Tiger Salamander’s corpse.
I think this is interesting because, while I’ve heard about Water Striders scavenging dead insects, I’ve not heard heard about them scavenging on dead vertebrates.
Pretty neat.
