Forum home› The potting shed
This Forum will close on Wednesday 27 March, 2024. Please refer to the announcement on the Discussions page for further detail.

URGENT!! ADVICE NEEDED the great diving beetle

Katie.janeKatie.jane Posts: 1
in The potting shed
We have a big pound and we love when the tadpoles and frogs come around, around two years ago we first spotted the larve of the great diving beetle, we did not think much of it until we saw them killing the tadpoles so we decided to start catching them and re locating them somewhere else.
unfortunately our efforts haven't worked and our pond has been absolutely destroyed and overrun with no life of frogs and tadpoles and only the vicious beetles and their larve.
im begging if anyone has advice on how to wipe them out completely to help as frogs often get run over and eaten and we set up our pond for them and it was working and very successful but now its just a waste pond with murky water and we cant get rid of them.
any advice would help.

Posts

  • KeenOnGreenKeenOnGreen Posts: 1,831
    As they are good flyers, and could easily re-establish in your pond, there is little point in you trying to eradicate them.  Arguably you should not try to disrupt a natural process.  

    We love our pond wildlife, and would love to have frogs or newts, but we accept whatever nature throws at us.  

    If that sounds harsh, I am totally sympathetic to your problem , and if they ever appear in our ponds, I will probably be straight on here moaning about it.  🙂
  • DovefromaboveDovefromabove Posts: 88,147
    edited May 2020
    Hi @Katie.jane  and welcome to the forum 😊  

    It’s all nature ... Gt Diving Beetles are wildlife too. 

    It seems that your pond provides a better habitat for the beetles than the frogs ... this is often the way with ponds ... it’s hard to create a balance ... in our pond the newts eat the frog tadpoles and grass snakes visit and eat the frogs. In our neighbours’ pond a heron visits regularly to hunt frogs. 

    In my experience frogs do far better in marshes and big ponds. That doesn’t mean that your pond is worthless.  It’s all nature, it’s all interesting and worth watching and learning about. Gt Diving Beetles are fascinating animals. 

    Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.





  • SkandiSkandi Posts: 1,723
    Many many things eat tadpoles, including dragonfly and damsel fly lava, it's one big fight in a pond. It sounds as if your pond is unbalanced, so there is nothing to eat the beetles (like fish) and they multiply too much.  If you can provide lots of hiding places like rocks and water plants then some tadpoles will normally make it each year. The beetles will have nothing to do with the murky water so that is a different imbalance.
    If they have truly eaten everything there is to eat then they will of course die themselves and there will be less around next year to eat next years clutch of baby frogs.
  • Butterfly66Butterfly66 Posts: 970
    edited May 2020
    We have diving beetles and tadpoles.The populations of both will probably balance out over time as @skandi says. They are all natives to British ponds so have obviously managed to live together.

    We were thrilled and then horrified our first year in this house when we had a heron visiting every day during early Autumn eating several large frogs in each visit. We thought we wouldn’t have any frogs left - we counted 60 this spring 🙂

    Edited - just to clarify he comes every year
     If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero
    East facing, top of a hill clay-loam, cultivated for centuries (7 years by me). Birmingham
Sign In or Register to comment.