Blink and you'll miss them

My school Latin teacher was quite canny. They selected passages (of Virgil, of course) for translation that they thought might hold the attention of young minds. I still remember the part where the Greek hero Ulysees drove a stake into the single eye of the monster that had taken him and his crew captive, blinding it and enabling their escape. I seem to remember quite graphic detail about the liquids flowing from the eye as the stake went in

The monster was a 'cyclops' - literally a 'circle-eye'. So are these - tiny crustaceans that have rapidly colonised the pond in large numbers, also with a single (compound) eye, hence the colloquial name. Scientifically, my friend with several zoology degrees told me, they are Copepods - meaning 'oar-feet'. They propel themselves through the water using appendages that some sources call legs and others antennae. 

They eat single-celled plants and floating detritus. I wonder if I have them to thank for the fact that the blanket weed (actually a single-celled algae) that was building up in the pond has disappeared. In their turn, they are eaten, one source explains, by "fish, squid...whales and seabirds", which could explain why the population is exploding, as we don't have many of those

Wikipedia says that "Some scientists say they form the largest animal biomass on earth", and they make the biggest contribution to the oceans being a carbon sink. I expect our population explosion is a sign that the pond has not yet reached a stable equilibrium in species composition. I have put in some more oxygenating plants today, so hopefully the oxygen in the water will not be depleted by the large numbers and cause a populatiin crash. If that does not work, I'll look for an online source of whales