A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
water strider
A water strider is an insect that stands and moves on the surface film of still or slow water. Its legs are covered in thousands of fine water-repellent hairs that trap air and hold the leg above the surface without breaking it, and the middle pair rows while the back pair steers. It hunts by feeling: It detects the ripples of a struggling insect and reads their direction and distance to find it.
Etymology
The English name is for the gait, and the animal has collected a great many others in different regions: pond skater in Britain, Jesus bug and water skipper in the United States, and in a fair number of languages some version of a cobbler or a tailor, from the way the legs work.
Notes
It also communicates in ripples. Males produce specific frequencies by vibrating their legs on the surface, using different signals for courtship, for territory, and for threat, so a pond surface carries a conversation conducted entirely in waves. Some ocean-going relatives live on the open Pacific hundreds of miles from land, which makes them the only insects that have properly colonized the sea.