FROGS
From A to Z

Did You Even Know How Well You Love Ponds?

If our cities were more like ponds, what a world this would be!

I’m serious, although you’ll have some reservations about a pond’s occasional, how do you say? Sliminess? Not exactly what we want for our homes, but the pond is a perfect place in this world, and here is why. Ponds take care of themselves, everyone else, and still have a little left over to spare.

A pond has water, the essential material for life, as our astronomers these days are reminding us in their search for other worlds that might try to rival ours in the natural wonder of life. Where there is water, there could be life they tell us, and the pond is a magnificent example of that potential. Ponds teem with life and with the natural cycle of death that feeds that life. Nutrients feed the tiniest microbes. Green plants – from tiny phytoplankton to strapping alder trees – crowd the pond with new green flesh inspired by the sun and formed out of the carbon that would otherwise be overheating our atmosphere. Plants bring the herbivores that bring the omnivores and carnivores. A pond can be as rich and varied as the justly prized rainforests of the world.

Like the rainforests, a pond is more than merely a home to a complex family of interdependent creatures. Ponds are our water filters, our levees, and our future farms.

Under heavy rains or swift, seasonal melts, ponds will hold and slowly release waters that would otherwise flood our towns and valleys. The kaleidoscopic carnival of microscopic critters in pond water chomp away at everything in the water, including the phosphorus and nitrogen, even the heavy metals we don’t want to drink, removing those things from the water that eventually enters the larger reservoirs we eventually draw from to slake our thirsts and cleanse our homes.

The slime of the pond is the muck that is filtered out of our lives. And in hundreds or thousands of years that muck and the silt that accumulates in ponds eventually heaps up until the pond is filled right in and the muck and slime have become the soil of a new forest or farm.

I said ponds have a little left over to spare in their cornucopia of abilities, but only just so much. The next article in this series will talk about what happens when a little capacity meets a whole lot of what we have to offer.