Running on Water

Sometimes I am amazed at the things that don't amaze me. Take my most recent visit to Bolsa Chica.

I was wandering along, watching the birds, looking at the plants, and admiring the view.  I stopped for a while to watch the water. Ripples, little snails, and bugs running on the water. Moving on.

No, wait. There are bugs running on the water. Bugs. Running on the water.  Little, tiny, mosquito-sized beings, running on the top of the water, moving against the tide.

How do they do that? I mean, yes, I have watched nature shows and recall, sort of, explanations about surface tension and the hairs on the feet being spread out and so on, but that's somewhere else, somewhere tropical, on still, green waters. These are here, in this city, only a few miles away from me.

They're small, too (probably so are the ones on the nature shows, really), smaller than mosquitoes, and semi-transparent--to that extent, even these photos are misleading about size, since I zoomed in. I had to look hard to spot individual bugs, and spent a while watching to make sure that, yes, they really were running on the water.

Here, in this town, there are bugs running on the water. And I never  noticed.