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The Wild Where You Are: Surprising Ways Bass Affect Plants Around Ponds

In nature, things are often connected in surprising ways, according to the book “Still Waters.”

Bass affect how much fruit grow on the plants around the ponds they live in. In order to learn more about this, I spoke to “Still Waters” author, Curt Stanger.

“There are really close ecological links between the world of a pond and the world of a forest or a meadow around it that we don’t often notice unless we watch carefully,” said Stanger. “If you look at the life around the pond, you might see some beautiful wildflowers and there are a lot of insects pollinating on there and they help the plants reproduce. But you might also notice if you sit there for a while that dragonflies and maybe even damsel flies sort of helicopter around the rim of the pond and there are hunting among the flowers to catch some of those insects that are pollinating the flowers.”

Dragonflies are almost perfect aerial predators. When they decide to kill, they have a nearly 95% success rate that makes them one of the most effective predators on Earth. Large numbers of dragonflies keep the number of pollinating insects low.

When the plants around ponds are not being pollinated, they don’t produce fruit, and without fruit, they can’t reproduce to start the next generation. So with dragonflies, you have fewer fruiting plants.

“So what’s this got to do with the pond?,” asked Stanger. “Well, it turns out what we think of as dragonflies, are actually just the final stage of an animal that spends most of their live underwater inside the pond. So their real story is in there.”

If the real story of a dragonfly begins underwater in a pond, I guess that’s where I’ll start looking.

A bass can eat a third of its body weight every day, and that is a lot of dragonfly nymphs. Top predators patrolling the water, devouring aquatic insects means fewer dragonfly nymphs transitioning into adults with fewer flying killing machines.

If there are more pollinating insects, more pollinating insects means more plants get pollinated that will ultimately grow more fruit.

This is one of the reasons I think nature is so amazing. It demonstrates how everything is connected in some way.

A bass, living it’s life at the bottom of a pond, may have effects on a world it’s not even aware of by just existing. It shapes an entire ecosystem.

If you happen to be lucky enough to live in northern Michigan, you’ve probably noticed some of your own connections with nature, and it reminds us that we’re all connected on this giant organism we call Earth.

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