Can someone confirm if this is a dragonfly nymph.

[MitchM]

Don't worry. More will dragonflies come back.
The boatman population will come and go as their food supply dictates.

 

[Lisak1]

Welcome @Earlofcrankcase ! Go on over to the newbie section and post an introduction. We'd love to hear about - and better yet see! - your pond!

 

[Earlofcrankcase]

Thanks. 1st thing I need to do is take my fish back to the school. Wait a minute, I'm the one in school here?
Don't worry, that was a pretty cryptic joke to understand and this fish doesn't school anyway.
I built a pond to get away from the disaster of trying to keep our geese clean & happy using kiddie pools. It's becoming one big nonstop ecosystem lessen but all I need to do is stop over reacting and give that slow moving old bag "mother nature" a chance to let her actions take their course. I think I pissed her off because she's brought in some heavy tadpole killing equipment herself. This property in inside a concrete street neighborhood a 1/2 a mile from the nearest creek and all of a sudden we have a water snake?

 

[Tara]

1st post from newbie: It is quite a learning experience to say the least. Now I just found out I most likely was killing future dragon fly's when I was trying to eradicate nasty water bugs that had moved in to help keep the tadpole population in check.

No worries they will be back, for all my love of land insects, I have never had aquatic ones in my garden so I have a lot to discover, and so do you, it's a new learning curve.

 

[stevekind]

Late addition to this thread - did a bit of research - Water boatmen are not carniverous - but "backswimmers" are - will take tadposles and small fish. The two insects are often mistaken for each other - but you can tell the "backswimmer" because, perhaps unsurprisingly, it swims on its back