Nothing screams true love more than pooping while holding hands 🥹 These funny looking water fleas are cousins with Daphnia and are from the Chydoridae family! They’re both microscopic crustaceans with leaf-shaped legs used for respiration and feeding. They’re abondant in freshwater habitats like ponds and lakes and play a major role in food chain by feeding in bacteria and algae and being preyed on by fishes, birds, frogs or other small predators. Unlike Daphnia which is mostly planktonic, Chydorids are benthic and feed on food particles that are scraped from plants, rocks and sand grains. Chydorids can swim with their small branch-shaped antennae like Daphnia but what differentiates them from Daphnia is their ability to crawl on substrates at the bottom of the water using their first trunk limbs while scraping out some food particles as well! That is some cool multitasking right here 🤠 They look like they have two eyes instead of one, like Daphnia, but the smaller black dot which is in front of the real eye is actually another structure called ocellus. This ocellus is a light sensing organ that is also present in some species of Daphnia but is way smaller than the one big compound eye, so it’s easy not to notice it! Video taken with my iPhone mounted on a BA310E Motic microscope with an @ilabcam ultra adapter 🔬 References: Dodson, S. L., Cáceres, C. E., & Rogers, D. C. (2010). Cladocera and other Branchiopoda. In Ecology and classification of North American freshwater invertebrates (pp. 773-827). Academic Press. Fryer, G. (1968). Evolution and adaptive radiation in the Chydoridae (Crustacea: Cladocera): a study in comparative functional morphology and ecology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 254(795), 221-385. #fyp #microscope #animals #water - @tardibabe