I'm Very Conflicted About My Gerridae

The Memsahib and I are obsessed with our new fake pond in the backyard.  We have 13 koi and two catfish, all with names:  Leon (the test fish you read about here), Electra, Jane, Barry, Flame, Sparky, 101, No-Name, SmartyPants, Lily, A-U, FancyPants, Dick, Otis, and Marion.  And yes, each of those names is meaningful to the person who named it.  We're hoping that we have not imposed too much gender confusion on our little school.

I was out gazing at the herd one afternoon when I saw something that absolutely astounded me:

A water strider.  An insect, Family Gerridae.  And another, and then one more. 

Also called pond skaters, skimmers, and water scooters, four of the water strider's six legs are constructed in such a way that the tiny beast is able to skate across calm waters supported only by the surface tension of the water.  They use the other two to propel them at amazing speeds across the surface.  They eat microscopic subsurface crud.

They are not rare.  But neither are they spontaneously generated out of fake pond chemicals.  They had to have gotten there somehow.  There are no waters within, oh, a mile or so where one might have expected a water strider to have come from.  In any event, of the thousands of water striders I've seen in waters all over the country, I have never seen one fly.  They do not appear on casual examination to have wings.  It seemed unlikely that they would have walked, or strode.  And we have an eight-foot fence around the joint, although I would not have thought it would be a particular hindrance to a determined water strider.

Irrespective of their mode of arrival, I got to thinking:  Why would these few water striders show up in my pond anyway? 

When a few young male seals move on to colonize a new location, it's because the dominant males where they had been living have shamed them out of the herd, beating them up or honking at them or slapping them with their flippers or whatever bully seals do to keep them away from the hot young babe seals (standards of female seal beauty being notoriously low).  They swim off to less threatening harbors where they laze about and stink and attract hoards of human admirers and EPA bureaucrats who tell you you have to move your yacht so these weenie geek seals can work on their tans.  

Adolescent lions who can't cut it with the pride similarly start their own families if they can find some homely chick lion to leave with them and get away from those irritable man lions with the fluffy necks and sharp claws.  

Similar behavior has been observed in post-adolescent human males, especially recent college and professional school graduates, who go on business trips and gather in the bar areas of steakhouses, some of which have pianos.  Don't ask me how I know this.

Drawing on this extensive knowledge of the characteristics of isolated male populations, I realized exactly what kind of water striders these were:

Losers.

I pictured them timidly approaching some comely lady striders, and promptly being aggressively skated off into the nether parts of the pond by studlier Gerridae.  Moping at the pond's margin in a batch of duckweed, they decided to strike out on their own and ended up in my fake pond, where they can rule the roost and offer to buy some cute stridette a mosquito-egg cosmopolitan.

Then I decided to do a spot of research, and I discovered this on Wikipedia:

"Similar to other bug groups (such as Pyrrhocoridae), the development of wings can vary significantly within the same population. The population consists mostly of specimens with undeveloped or poorly developed wings. However, a small number of individuals have fully developed wings which they use for colonizing new habitats and forming new populations."

Whoa.  I began to view our visitors in a new light.  Perhaps they weren't the strikeout kings of nearby waters, but were instead -- pioneers, brave explorers, the vanguard of the species, the lone hope for the colonization of new ecosystems.  They were the heroes of their kind.  And totally hitting the stridettes they'd lured there far from home.  "Forming new populations" indeed!  Hey, longlegs, hows about you and I skate on over to that lily pad and form a new population?  No, really, the Beemer's paid for.  No wonder the koi left them alone.  These bugs were major dudes.

Filled with a new admiration for these selfless pioneers and sexual adventurers, I returned to the pond with a new appreciation for their courage and (dare I say American?) spirit.

They were gone.

What -- my fake pond scum wasn't slimy enough for them?  Our subsurface microorganisms weren't tasty enough?  Was the surface tension of our fake pond not tense enough for their liking?  Not enough silicone in the stridettes' thoraxes to hold their interest?  No  piano? 

Huh.

Losers.

Leon, the Test Fish

I have always wanted to own property with water on it.  Maybe it's because I grew up in Bellevue, Nebraska, hard on the banks of the Missouri River, and frequently explored Fontenelle Forest with its springs and streams and lakes.  Maybe it is something more primitive, some atavistic urge to identify with the Precambrian stew of complex hydrocarbons where one day a couple billion years ago (give or take an eon), non-life sparked into life. 

Or it could just be because I like frogs and stuff.

No matter.  My choice of career ensures that I am condemned to living in or near large cities where most of the flowing water I encounter is in the atria of large hotels.  So when The Memsahib suggested that we should transform our backyard -- approximately the size of a Kia's trunk -- into a ecofriendly North Texas biosystem, I readily agreed.  In addition to a backyard full of beautiful trees, bushes, and flowers (and a gigantic built-in natural-gas grill that taps directly into the Barnett Shale and what I'm sure is a very green 46" Samsung flatscreen to make sure we don't miss any of the Cowboy game whilst grilling), we now have a fake waterfall feeding a burbling fake brook that winds (well, it has one curve -- you can't do a lot of winding in ten feet) toward another fake waterfall into a fake pond.  The pond slurries off into a filter and a pump under a fake rock that sends it back up to the fake headwaters that seem to appear out of nowhere to begin the trip all over again.

And we wanted koi, which, translated, means "grotesquely-colored carp with gratuitously showy fins that look like a cross between cardinal and a dalmatian."

Neither of us knew koi from a sperm whale, but it seemed like exactly the sort of thing a North Texas ecosystem needed -- Japanese-sounding fish whose bright colors and gentle nature would have ensured their instant death in any self-respecting Texas waterway.

Our first problem was that we didn't know where to acquire koi.  I suggested Kois 'R' Us, but a quick Google search was unfruitful.

Our second problem was that we did not know anything about fake ponds, algae, pH, chemical balance, food, or anything else necessary to keeping koi alive for the period between releasing them into the pond and rushing the grandchildren over to see them.

Fortunately, we were blessed with a contractor who once had a koi pond himself  (shameless plug:  Tim Euting with Cutters Lawn and Landscape, http://www.cutterslawnandlanscape.com/) who promised to instruct us in koi pond maintenance.  One day when the project was almost complete, I met with him to check the progress of our backyard's transformation.  When we got to the pond, he said:  "I brought you a test fish."

I looked into the pond, saw nothing.  "He's not dead yet," Tim assured me.

"There he is," Tim said.  Sure enough, there was a solitary goldfish, not more than two inches long.  He was a pretty little dickens, white and bright orange, sort of a Holstein of goldfish.  He was swimming.  I took this as a positive sign.

Not Leon

I named him Leon, for Juan Ponce de León, who searched unsuccessfully for the fountain of youth. This is not Leon, but if you can imagine this fish with a more streamlined body and less fabulous tail, you'll come pretty close.

When The Memsahib got home I took her out to the pond and after awhile we saw Leon swimming merrily about.

"Do we get to keep him?" she asked.

"Sure," I said.

But then I thought:  Do we? 

What is a test fish, anyway?

Perhaps he had gone through a lengthy and expensive training regimen to become a test fish, and we were only his latest assignment.

Perhaps he was conditioned to be exquisitely sensitive to koi-threatening conditions that he communicated to contractors through semaphore-like signals from his tiny fins.

Perhaps he had exhibited unusual bravery in his koi nursery that suited him to inaugurate amateur suburban backyard fake ponds and their fake owners.

Perhaps his test-fish hardiness would lull us into a false sense of competence in not killing fish and mislead us into believing that any old fish could survive the neglect for which The Mem and I are known among lower vertebrates.

Perhaps he would quickly grow bored with the sameness of our recirculated waters and long for another challenge, or would become a malcontent among the other fishes we hoped soon to introduce, sowing piscatory revolution and advocating for health-care reform.

As it turns out, however, Leon was a standard $0.89 goldfish from Petco that Tim quickly forgot about, and Leon was ours.

Since then, we have introduced ten more fish into the pond.  One (SmartyPants, named for its large bright-orange forehead) immediately  headed for the waterfall and was never seen again, and another (Goldie) began swimming at an alarmingly diagonal angle and vanished soon thereafter.  But the other eight are thriving and growing, despite my efforts at overfeeding.  Leon is still the smallest of the fish, but exhibits a refreshing independence.  The Mem and I have a soft spot in our hearts for Leon, and we still harbor the suspicion that he was chosen especially for this mission.

Perhaps I should have named him Yeager.