Water Scorpion

• GeneralIt breathes through a tail tube that breaks the surface like a snorkel.
• It swims very poorly: it prefers to walk along the bottom, and its dead-leaf appearance makes it all but invisible.
• It has wings folded beneath its wing cases, but most individuals never fly at all because their flight muscles are atrophied.
• It is no scorpion and it does not sting with its tail: what looks like a sting is a breathing siphon formed of two interlocking half-tubes, which it pushes up to the surface to breathe. The painful jab comes from the proboscis.
• It hunts by ambush: it stays motionless among the vegetation and seizes insect larvae, crustaceans, tadpoles and small fish with its raptorial front legs.
• It is one of the leading predators of mosquito larvae — Anopheles, Culex and Aedes — and is being studied as a biological control agent against disease vectors.
• The eggs, stuck upright into the substrate, carry five to eight respiratory horns that float free in the water; only the family Nepidae has them.
• The nymphs have no developed siphon and breathe through six pairs of abdominal spiracles.

Habitat & environment

Shallow bottoms of ponds, ditches and backwaters

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepa_cinerea