SILT: fine sand, clay, or other material carried by running water and deposited as a sediment, especially in a channel or harbor a continuous stretch or expanse especially : a straight portion of a stream or river ORĢ. NYMPHS: the stage of the insect that is still aquatic (such as an earthworm or a fungus) that feeds on dead and decomposing organic matter.īENTHOS: organisms that live on or in the bottom of a body of water “ruptured pitch pockets, punky birch logs, and fragrant cedar duff” My Calvin English professor John Timmerman instilled this habit that still hangs on. And they are here – instructing us geological ephemera in an essential precious truth. Before mammals, before dinosaurs, before even the bulk of the insects that are familiar to us, they were there. But they speak to us across the unfathomably vast reaches of prehistory time. I wish more of us understood that.īiologists use the presence of mayfly nymphs as an indicator of clean oxygen-rich water. They won’t know the stillness, the pungency of ruptured pitch pockets, punky birch logs, and fragrant cedar duff. The activists won’t likely live to see the riverine corridor cradled in the protective and perpetual shade of spreading cedar trees and patient hemlocks and upstart balsam fir thickets. Dark and wet forests will take significantly longer. The oxygen-hungry mayflies (certainly one of the earth’s most grace-full creatures – in every sense) have returned. They bouldered the reach to facilitate juvenile fish movement. They planted native trees along the margins to re-start the transition to a dark and wet riparian forest. They stabilized the banks with root-wads and rocks and contoured the upper banks to more faithfully mimic the old floodplain. They probed the silt to find, and then expose the ancestral channel. A legacy of our addled human-time hubris.Īctivists and community heroes raised the financial and political capital to remove the dam. The power line traverses the path of an old earthen dam that choked the river for decades burying it under many feet of silt. The Boardman River, site of a removed damĮvery summer we take our Au Sable students and visit a reach of the storied Boardman River upstream from Traverse City (where the famous Adams dry fly, a mayfly pattern, was invented and first used). For mayflies, the adult is only a brief transition between successive generations of nymphs.

Mayfly nymphs may live for years as tiny aquatic predators or detritivores in the benthos. But for procreation, mayflies turn this perspective on its head. In the animals we typically think about, including ourselves, we default to a view of young and juvenile stages as transition stages on the way to adulthood where all the important action takes place. Indeed, to them we are the ephemera (hat tip to Debra Rienstra for that observation). Calling them “ephemeral” reflects our own biases about time. I diverted over into the school parking lot to take a picture of my stowaway. Thousands of species in nearly every clearwater niche are proof. The mayfly adult is evolutionary purpose sharpened to a fine point and hardened in the crucible of deep time. That is a presumption of the recently evolved. They are so single minded (and single-purposed) that they don’t even have functional mouth parts.Īncient is not primitive. Mayflies belong to the ancient insect order Ephemeroptera which shares the root of the word “ephemeral” reflecting the fact that adults only live a day or so during which they dance their ecstasy over the water, mate in midair, and lay their eggs in the constant cool surface film before shuffling off this mortal coil – having distilled the essentials of the animal imperative to perpetuate the species into the space of a single warm summer day. They are a hundred times older than humanity.

Subjectivity being what it is, I think mayflies rank among the most beautiful in the animal kingdom, the graceful curves, the long and elegant tails, the diaphanous wings held like a mainsail raked aft. I still look for mayflies, though, whenever I am near water. A mayfly.įly fishing (and fly tying) made me appreciate mayflies but I no longer fly fish much. I reached over and it crawled on my finger. Nearly home, a familiar helicoptering-like flight hovered across the inside of the windshield and landed on the dash. It was buggy and still at the lower end of Cherokee marsh when I left.

Ephemeral mayflies