While looking for frog eggs with the habitat committee, I noticed all these tiny specs floating on the water. They were unidentifiable as you looked at them on the surface. You could only observe that they ever so slightly jumped around as you waded through them. They were sprinkled everywhere on the surface but also formed dense rafts as they congregated on blades of grass on top of the water. I put my macro lens on my phone camera to get a closer look at this mystery and hopefully figure out what they were. The first photo is the fixed 10x lens, and in the second photo, I zoomed to 2x on my phone. The photos revealed a wrinkled, gray creature with pink legs! Based on how they hopped in every direction, someone in the group wondered if they were a species of springtails. I submitted the photo to iNaturalist and it suggested that they were water springtails (Poduridae). Looking up photos, I found them to closely match Podura aquatica.
In my research, I found out that they eat decaying organic material, so it makes sense that they were hanging out of these blades of grass. So they are one of the many necessary decomposers that help break down vegetation to return nutrients to the environment and keep the water clean. I hope that their presence indicates a healthy, thriving wetlands ecosystem.
It was fascinating to see so many, and I wondered what prompted them to want to hatch out in great numbers now.
I also discovered that springtails are not insects. Biologists have classified them as part of the class Collembola, not Insecta. They are both hexapods (6 legs), but the key difference that prompted this distinction is springtails have internal mouthparts, unlike insects which have external mouthparts. I am still researching this, but I thought I would pass it along for your curiosity.