The aquatics

Salt marsh pothole

The only place where truly aquatic insect life flourishes on a salt marsh is a small pool aka pothole. Mudflats hold too little water (but are a great habitat for various fly larvae wallowing in the soft ooze). Creeks, ponds, or ditches that hold water permanently or are flushed with the daily tides are off limits to aquatic insects due to voracious little predators, the salt marsh killifish.Potholes are something in between, either ephemeral or inaccessible by all but the highest tides. 





A pothole provides a home to an amazing array of shapes and forms - beetles, flies, true bugs, dragonflies, abd springtails. The omnivorous water boatmen (Trichocorixa verticalis)are the most ubiquitous denizens of that world eating both plants and little animal, and protected against fish predation by noxious excretions (like many other true bugs..) They might even outnumber the salt marsh mosquitoes...

Water boatman (Trichocorixa verticalis)

At the bottom of a pothole

A shore fly larvae (Ephydra subopaca) secretively hang around the pothole margins betraying their presence by the numerous shed skins remaining after molting into an adult. 

A soldier fly larva (Stratiomyidae sp) can grow to about  an inch long and is a peaceful filter feeder suspended almost motionless amid the calm water of the pool

A fierce but lazy predator (a water scavenger beetle, Tropisternus quadristriatus)  that is even larger stalks its prey, the mosquito larvae in this case, carefully

 

 While a more placid beetle cousin, Enochrus hamiltoni, feeds on detritus and organic matter

The little creatures such as the pupae of the biting midges (Ceratopogonidae) from the nonbiting genus Dasyhelea are visible to the discerning eye, and the surface is sometimes covered with little jumping dots, the springtail Anurida maritima

Dasyhelea pseudocincta pupal skin

Springtail (Anurida maritima)

A ferocious predators inhabits the depths of the salt marsh potholes.  The only truly marine dragonfly, Seaside dragonlet (Erythrodiplax berenice) devours mosquito larvae and other aquatic critters as an ugly baby "duckling" before turning into one of the most precious jewels of the salt marsh.