How to Eliminate Water Striders in Pools

Free your pool of water striders with a few sanitizing steps.

Water striders live in bodies of water and feed off of small insects such as mosquito larvae residing in the water. Swimming pools provide an excellent home for water striders when the pool is not properly sanitized. Water striders reside on the surface of the water, rendering typical chemical treatments ineffective at eliminating them. Killing the small insects that are food for the water strider and regularly skimming the water surface with a leaf net effectively frees a pool of water striders.

Things You'll Need

• Pool sanitizer
• Vacuum equipment
• Leaf net

Instructions

1. Raise the sanitizer level of the pool water with chemical shock treatments. Chlorine-based pools utilize granule chlorine shock as a sanitizer, while biguanide and bromine pools use the standard chemical "C" as a sanitizer. These treatments kill insects in the water that act as the water strider's food source.

2. Wait several hours for the chemical treatments to correctly sanitize the pool water. Vacuum the pool's bottom with standard vacuuming equipment. Vacuuming removes dead insects and many other contaminants from the pool.

3. Skim the surface of the pool with a leaf net. Due to water striders residing on or near the surface of the pool water, a large portion of the strider population is removed through this process. Repeat the skimming until all surface striders are removed.

4. Treat the pool chemically every week to keep the water strider's food supply exhausted. Over time the few striders left in the water after the skimming process die due to starvation.

Tips & Warnings

• Sanitize, vacuum and skim your pool weekly to keep many other hostile insects and algae out of your pool water.

References

• Fcps: Common Water Strider
• Pool Center: Pool Cleaning Info