Sue and I found a superb artificial pond whilst exploring the slopes on the quarries above Trefor. The “pond” looks like it was originally built to store water for some part of the quarrying production. The pond is around 18 metres in length by 5 metres in width. Depth does not appear to be more than about 1.5 metres maximum and most of the pond much shallower than this with sparse vegetation mainly at one end of the pond. What immediately drew out attention were the huge number of Smooth Newts in the pond in May, we counted over 50 surfacing to breath in a 5 minute period so estimate the pond must contain hundreds of adult newts. Dragonfly larvae were seen resting head down on the vegetation waiting to grab any unwary Common Frog tadpoles of which there were hundreds seen.
We intend to investigate the pond more fully come the summer holidays when we will have time to net the pond to see what other invertebrates we can find and identify.
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