Haslemere Educational Museum
Museum Pond
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Pond Life
The museum pond is a freshwater habitat with a good variety of both native and non-native plants. The water allows many wild animals and insects to complete their life cycle.
Creatures such as frogs, dragonflies and some hoverflies have an aquatic stage and need to spend part of their life underwater. Emerging adult insects often use the pond-side vegetation as they climb out of the water and dry their wings before flying.
Ponds are typically small bodies of stagnant water with shallow margins shelving to deeper water in the centres or sides, depending on their profiles. Observing the museum's pond and its surrounds in January it's hard to imagine the rich colours and vegetative assembly along with the explosion of activity that will occur during the coming year.
Pond Habitat
On the pond's edge is a wide range of marginal or swamp plants and in January you will see the withered stems of last years greater willow herb reed mace or bulrush and yellow iris. Across the pond's surface are the floating leaves of the water lily and just beneath there are the various green stems of the submerged plants. These underwater plants include the starwort, water milfoil and canadian pond weed.
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Later completely floating plants like the water crowfoot and water soldier will grow. All these will cover the pond's surface giving shelter and sustenance to numerous plants and animals. It is among these pond plants, that even in winter, if you turn over a lily leaf you will find attached to the underside water beetles, flat worms leeches, and small crustaceans water fleas.
If a net is swept through the water another mass of life can be revealed, as sticklebacks, dragonfly nymphs, water beetle larva and many more will be seen. There are smaller organisms like the mosquito fly larva Diatoms daphnia and many others on which the fish and tadpoles will feed.
