Was doing a bug check at Bear Creek today. We were mostly doing this with the intention of tuning in our camera settings for taking bug shots on local tailwaters for our book. I've been doing bug kicks for some time, and while I've never pretended to be an entomologist, I'd like to think I have our tailwaters pretty dialed in. Small streams, however, are a different beast, and today we dredged up this worm that looked like it was straight out of that "monsters inside me" tv show. The video was shot at 60 fps, which ended up being the perfect speed because it accurately captured how quickly this worm was whipping around in real life.
A question I get often from clients during guide trips is, can I drink the water? My honest answer is yes, but if you knew what was swimming around in there, would you want to? And this just reaffirms that...
Basically, we would like to know more about this. If any of you can answer the simple questions like, is this non-native? is it parasitic? have you ever seen these in other rivers in Colorado? are these potentially in our drinking water? does this thing give you the heebee jeebees? etc... We would love to hear from you!
Also, just a heads up that the parts in the video where it looks like part of the worm disappears are from reflections coming off the surface of the water in the dish we were using.
Try nematode or Nematomorpha. I enjoy you site very much. Thanks for doing it.
ReplyDeleteThank you, BrookTrooper!
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