A Year in the Valley

In my fishing net on Tuesday, I also found some of these.  They were difficult to manoeuvre into the jam jar for photographing, so I lost a couple.  At first I assumed they were mosquito larvae, but I realised that they didn’t have the hammer-head shape, rather a question-mark silhouette as you can see.  Also, once in the jam jar, this one moved like a caterpillar, looping along the bottom, rather than wiggling zig-zag style through the water as I would expect a mosquito larva to do.  I’m still not 100% sure, but I think this could be a phantom midge larva so-called because it is transparent – you can see its eyes and insides only.  You can get other midge larvae that aren’t transparent and some look more like worms.