They are among the most numerous of multi-celled animals in any body of water. They migrate passively, caught up in the feathers of waterfowl, stuck to aquatic insects that move from pond to pond, or in dust clouds that blow encysted larvae across the landscape from a dried up pond. Within the crustacea, cyclops (which is both singular and plural) are in the class Maxillopoda and in the subclass Copepoda (a diverse group comprised of about 13,000 species).Ĭyclops and the rest of their copepod brethren are everywhere on the globe, mainly in calm waters, cold or warm, from the water traps of bromeliads to roadside ditches to underground caves to oceans. The Subphylum Crustacea is in the huge phylum Arthropoda arthropoda also includes insects and spiders, and the phylum may account for 80% of known, living species of animals. As crustaceans, they number shrimp, crayfish and lobsters among their distant relatives, too. These pear-shaped critters are related to fairy shrimp, daphnia, scuds, sowbugs, and water sowbugs-all of previous BOTW fame. The BugLady has always viewed cyclops as tiny, benign critters that twitch through their watery lives at the very limits of her vision, but it turns out that they have a dark side. The Cyclops is an aquatic non-insect whose name is taken from a character in classical Greek mythology (the BugLady trusts that BugFans will dust off the tattered Edith Hamilton mythology paperbacks they’ve been carting around since high school and will look up the story of Cyclops). A reminder to newer BugFans-the BOTW definition of “bug” is the one that your average first grader uses. The ephemeral pond is humming these days, and the BugLady has been giving her 50mm macro lens a workout, channeling her inner photomicroscopist (a person who takes pictures through a microscope).
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