I'm really into microbiology as a hobby, and one of the things I do is collect samples of pond water in a jar and create an enclosed ecosphere, where I study and categories the creatures I find. Now this is just a hobby, I find it fun and it gets me out the house quite a lot.
One thing that I am a custom to seeing a lot of in my ecosystems are hydras, specifically green hydras (Hydra viridissima). They are anemone like creatures usually growing up to around 2cm tops. They are a good balance for the food chain, controlling populations of copepods, ostracods, and whatever critters they can catch including sometimes worms or daphnia.
Anyways I recently made an ecosphere from a random new pond in my area, and for the first week, everything seemed normal. The appearance of the usual creatures happened including green hydras, and teir populations remained stable for the next 2 weeks. Thats when everything changed.
Over the course of 3 days the creatures slowly began to die out, even the hardy ostracods lost significant numbers and 1 by 1 they went extinct. One morning i came to check on the jar, and found nothing except tens of thousands of tiny 5mm green worms… and behemoth green hydras. I'm not joking, the biggest ones were coming in at 15cm, almost 10 times their normal fully grown size. These behemoth hydras also coincidentally directly aligned with the extinction of every creature in the ecosphere, except a few lucky nematodes. I would not be surprised if they took down the 5cm nymph in the ecosphere that also vanished. I dug through the web for information, however found nothing. Even the largest freshwater hydra species was only around 3cm when fully grown, and even then, the hydras in my ecosphere where green, not white. Nothing on Reddit I found explained this anomaly either.
Does anyone have any idea why these hydras are so big, and are they even the same species. Could this be an undiscovered species or am I just getting my hopes up?
If you need more info I can provide context or other images. Just let me know.
In the image above is one of the smaller oversized hydras, around 10cm. For context the larger ones are less visible, although parts of them can be made out in the background
The image is low quality so it takes a while to make out. As can be seen they have huge 5cm tentacle spans. Some are even growing on others. They could easily have taken down literally everything else that lived in there previously.
by Signal-Stable-9977
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