What’s this in my pond?

[bigbadbarry]

It’s not really gardening but I couldn’t find a wildlife topic! See photo attached. It’s about an inch long and looks like small black dots in jelly so I though some sort of amphibian spawn - but definitely not a frog, newts apparently lay individual eggs (we do have baby newts in the pond and they are super cute) and toad spawn is bigger than this, isn’t it? Google lens thinks it is a leech but I don’t think that is right either. Anybody?

I reckon that could be a small amount of toad spawn, yes. Maybe it just didn't develop for some reason as it would usually be earlier in the year.

I’m pretty sure it is new … I spend quite a lot of time looking in the pond (baby newts 😂) and haven’t seen it before. Maybe she’s a slow starter

That is pond snail eggs.

Toad spawn is really pretty I think, like a necklace! But I love toads in general. Fingers crossed you get toads soon OP.

Is it! We do have a lot of snails. Brilliant, thank you so much

We do have a toad in the garden but I’ve never found toad spawn in the pond. Fingers crossed one day we do!

Toad spawn is much more structured, a long string (metre or more) with a double row of eggs.

Snail eggs

The snail eggs, or the black thing above your finger?

The black thing is probably a Planarian (type of flat worm)

The snail eggs. And now I know what they are! I went back out this morning to show them to my DD and there are loads more, very cool