7 Cool Facts About Water Striders

They walk on water, they devour mosquito larvae and they have one of the most disturbing mating rituals on earth. Take a close look at this common insect of Northern Hemisphere ponds, creeks and puddles.

Water striders are one of the most interesting and enjoyable aquatic creatures to observe. Best of all, they’re found widely across the Northern Hemisphere – in lakes, creeks, urban ponds, water features and even mud puddles.

Their lives on the water’s surface make them easy for even a young child to observe. Last week, my two-year-old and I watched a throng of water striders (also known as water skippers or pond skaters) on a small, local canal. Even though the canal was just beginning to fill with water, the water striders were already there.

There have been some 1,700 species of water striders identified. While they superficially resemble spiders, they’re actually insects, members of the family Gerridae.

Here are seven cool facts about water striders.

  1. How water striders walk on water

    Photo © Jin Kemoole / Flickr through a Creative Commons license

    The first thing you notice about water striders is their rapid skipping across the water surface. Most insects of a water strider’s weight would quickly sink and drown. How do they stay on the surface?

    Recent research provides the answer. Water strider legs are covered in thousands of microscopic hairs scored with tiny groves. As reported in National Geographic, “These groves trap air, increasing water resistance of the water’s striders legs and overall buoyancy of the insect.”

    The water skipper’s legs are so buoyant they can support fifteen times the insect’s weight without sinking. Even in a rainstorm, or in waves, the strider stays afloat.

    If a water strider’s legs go underwater, it’s very difficult for them to push to the surface.

    Their legs are more buoyant than even ducks’ feathers.

    The ultra-floatation capabilities of water skipper legs may have applications for human use, such as self-cleaning surfaces and antidew materials.

  2. More about those legs

    Photo © Alexander / Flickr through a Creative Commons license

    The strider’s legs do more than repel water; they’re also configured to allow efficient and rapid movement across the surface.

    As with all insects, the water strider has three pairs of legs. The front legs are much shorter, and allow the strider to quickly grab prey on the surface. The middle legs act as paddles. The back legs are the longest and provide additional power, and also enable the strider to steer and “brake.”

    The buoyancy and paddling legs allows striders to be fast. Very, very fast. The National Geographic article reports striders are capable of “speeds of a hundred body lengths per second. To match them, a 6-foot-tall person would have to swim at over 400 miles an hour.”

    Unfortunately for the water strider, these extraordinary capabilities don’t extend to land. Their legs are almost useless on hard surfaces.

  3. Water striders are efficient predators

    Photo © Aiwok (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

    That speed is essential for the strider’s most important task: snatching prey off the water’s surface. While striders don’t bite people, they are highly efficient predators. A water strider rapidly grabs a small insect with its front legs, then uses its mouthparts to pierce the prey’s body and suck out its juices.

    They are particularly effective predators of mosquito larvae. As the Backyard Arthropod Project blog writes, “Since mosquito larvae breathe through a snorkel that they poke through the surface of the water, the water striders can grab them by the snorkel and eat them. I approve of this.”

    As do I. It’s always good to have some striders around. However, if there are too many water striders around and they run out of mosquito larvae, they eat each other.

  4. Their courtship is not very romantic

    Water striders using surface tension when mating. Photo © Markus Gayda [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

    Even people who are normally creeped out by insects tend to enjoy water striders. Everything about them seems pretty benign. Except for their mating habits.

    If you watch a pond’s water striders long enough, you often see two water striders on top of one another. Yes, that’s what you think it is. However, females have evolved a “genital shield” to guard against unwanted males mating with them.

    The male water striders have coevolved a strategy so that the female is more likely to submit to advances. The male taps the water’s surface in a way attractive to aquatic predators. Since the female is beneath the male, and nearer the water, she will be the one first gobbled up by a fish or other hungry creature. Thus, it behooves the female to submit quickly and not deploy the shield (or “insect chastity belt,” as one reporter put it).

    For water striders, love is a battlefield. Ecologists call this “antagonistic coevolution.” Popular bloggers call this a lot of things, many of them unsuitable for a family audience.

  5. They can fly, too. Sometimes.

    Photo © arian.suresh / Flickr through a Creative Commons license

    Many strider species have wings of varying lengths, depending on habitat conditions. Species frequenting calm waters typically have large wings. Species that live in swift waters have short ones, as long wings could be easily damaged.

    But other species have wings only when they’re likely to need them. Called polymorphism, it is the mechanism that enables a parent to have one brood of young without wings, while the next brood has them. This allows water striders to be very adaptable to changing water and habitat conditions.

    For instance, if the strider is living in small wetland and temperatures are rising, the habitat is likely to disappear. Thus a mechanism is triggered so the next generation of water striders has wings, allowing them to fly away from their drying wetland. But if the wetland is lush, wet and expansive, the strider has young without wings – the wings take more energy to maintain, and there’s no benefit to having them if they aren’t needed.

    This capability allows striders to colonize all sorts of aquatic habitats, including tiny ponds and even mud puddles. If the habitat doesn’t last, the next generation has the ability to move on.

  6. Water striders could be flying over you, right now

    Water striders on the Congaree river near Columbia, South Carolina. Photo © Hunter Desportes / Flickr through a Creative Commons license

    Entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer, in his readable natural history book A Walk Around the Pond, shares this story from his friend James Sternburg.

    “Every spring, Jim … thoroughly cleans and fills his plastic-lined pond with freshwater. Year after year, adult water striders arrive within a day or even minutes after the pond is filled. He has told me, with what I think is only a little exaggeration, that ‘the air must be crowded with cruising water striders looking for a pond.’”

    I’ve noticed this, too. When my son and I checked out the local canal, it was just beginning to fill, yet water striders were already occupying every pool of water. I’ve found striders on puddles in arid high desert mountains, miles from running water. How can they find these new habitats?

    Waldbauer points to research that suggests aquatic insects are attracted to any reflecting surface. If a strider sees such a surface, it checks it out. It suggests that Waldbauer’s friend is probably not too far off the mark, either. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, right now there’s probably a number of water striders flying around over you, looking for new water to colonize.

  7. Water striders take to the sea, too

    Halobates sp. Photo © Cory Campora [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

    It’s common to hear biologists say that our planet is dominated by insects. And it’s hard to argue: after all, there are at least 900,000 insect species, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s known species. The sheer numbers of ants, termites, bees and other species is staggering.

    But this is true only on land and in freshwater habitats. By sea, insects are often conspicuously absent. Of those 900,000 species, only a few hundred are found in the ocean.

    Some water strider species are among them. These species lack wings and can be found far out to sea. There is some disagreement as to their habits and diet, but many sources suggest they feed on fluids secreted by dead floating animals.

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73 comments

  1. John Sullivan says:

    Thanks for this great info on one of my favorite insects! Going to see if I can relocate some to an artificial pond in my backyard. None have colonized it on their own.

  2. Marian Whitcomb says:

    I have always wanted to know more about these lovely creatures! The shadows they cast are amazing. But…isn’t a “grove” a small group of trees? And a groove something that could catch air? (you can delete this if I am right, I hate criticizing someone in public).

    1. Lisa Feldkamp says:

      Hi Marian, Don’t worry – this is a good question. Grove is being used metaphorically here – a “grove” of the microscopic hairs, standing up like a forest.

    2. Lisa Feldkamp says:

      I suppose there would be grooves between the groves too 🙂

  3. Ted Williams says:

    Love them. We grew up calling them “four oarsmen.” My kids and I enjoyed feeding them adult mosquitoes.

  4. Ted Williams says:

    John: You might not have to relocate them. We have a garden pond half a mile from the nearest water, and they found it as did green frogs and the odd bullfrog.

  5. Michael Marchiano says:

    Great article….never realized we had ocean going striders…watched them for hours and still find these creatures fascinating.

  6. Annemarie van Hemmen says:

    Thank you! Serendipity? As I stared across the river observing ospreys on their nest and swallows scooping up insects late afternoon earlier this week, I just happened to be contemplating that I haven’t seen water striders for quite a few years, and… how little I actually know about their habits & habitats.

  7. Mae Ann Henderson says:

    Thank you for this article – Water Striders – Life one never thinks about – at least not until a fun article like this. I will check out the pond in the backyard to see what I can find. mah

  8. Larry Francis says:

    Fascinating article! Thanks!

  9. Lowell H. Young says:

    I have a good friend who likes to sit in streams. He questioned your comment that water striders don’t bite people. He has been bitten so often that he started wearing long socks to avoid being bitten. He said that the bite results in skin swelling like a big mosquito bite.

  10. William H. Monenschein says:

    Matt – I was sitting by a pond in Lithia Park in Ashland, OR today and watched Water Striders skimming the water. I also watched as they went across some floating leaves and were able to hop or jump across. I never knew what these creatures were called, so when I got home I got on my computer and found this website. There are a lot of facts about these creatures that I would have never know. I appreciate this information. I’m always ready to learn something new. Thanks for the info.