Hanging Basket in Fish Tank

Hanging Basket holding smaller fish
Bluegill are piscivores. They loves to eat them some fish.

I first suspected this when all but two of the happy minnows disappeared in a single day without a trace. Never saw those last two again.

Now, if bluegills ate their own without a trace, I might not have roused myself to make a hanging basket. But they do enough damage to kill the victim fish and nip off the yummy parts (not necessarily in that order). So from time to time I've lifted the lid to find the remains of a meal floating belly up.

Since these remains were always from small fish (< 2 inches), I decided I needed to protect the fish. The basket you see above is just a mesh laundry bag, a section of hose, and a hollow pool noodle (I used a 6 inch length of 3/4" PVC pipe to connect the two ends). I snipped holes in the hose so it would flood, then used a rolled-up bit of snipped hose shoved in the two ends to hold the ends together to form a ring. The only problem is the little fish are hard to catch. But I caught the slow ones (the ones more likely to end up as a meal), and the bag itself serves as a bit of cover. At least that's my theory, which I will proclaim proved if I don't find any more remains...


Then there are the other denizens of the garden. Spiders I actually welcome, and I recognize most the bugs I see. But my daughter was shocked to find a mass of not-so-little black bugs on one of the strawberry plants.

Bugs on the Strawberries
If you happen to know what these are, I'd love it if you'd share. I initially thought they were ticks (yikes!), but on closer examination, I'm back to not having a clue what they are:

Do you know what this bug is?