Water Scorpion

A brilliant day surveying ponds on the reserve with ecologists from the Sussex Wildlife Trust and from the Freshwater Habitats Trust. We managed to cover four of the 30+ ponds and found a huge variety of wildlife - including three species of notonecta, four types of leech, great diving beetles, great silver beetle, water ladybird. The rarest find was the pond mud snail (omphircola glabra). My contribution was a water scorpion (nepa cinerea) and a 13-spot ladybird - which flew off before I could photograph it. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be doing a water quality survey on all the ponds.