Red mosquito
Pond skaters, diving beetles and back-swimmers
Where the rivers slow and pool, or become trapped in quirks of Skull Island's geography, the brackish water becomes a miniature battleground for armies of tiny invertebrates, all warring with one another for survival.
An arms race is in effect, with each species trusting in its own particular specialization to grant it a winning edge over its competitors, predators and prey. If living in the jungle is a dangerous proposition, being small and underwater is positively perilous.
Predatory pond skaters skim the water, propped on splayed legs as they hunt on the filmy surface for anything dead or alive. Mirrored below, rapacious back-swimmers nearly two inches long hang suspended, senses primed for the bowstrung pluck of prey, like Noxomuscus, on the water. Both predators detect ripples of potential prey on the surface film like warships scanning for radar signatures. Zoning in on telltale ripples, their snapping forelegs grapple and pin while spear-like mandibles pierce to suck vital juices. There are also diving beetles present that are mostly scavengers.
mosquitoes of Skull Island
Mosquito larvae and their close kin, writhing fit-like in the thousands, are food for fish of all kinds. As adults they emerge from the water like rising apparitions, brightly-colored and jeweled with sparkling, metallic patterns. Skull Island has countless unique species. Mortaspis, with its yellow and black barring and striking death's-head marking, is not a wasp at all, but a bloodsucker related to mosquitoes. The brilliant red Spinaculex has tall spines and a bulbous thorax and can expand to accommodate the life fluids it draws from the flesh of such larger creatures as dinosaurs with its hypodermic mouthparts. Growing almost two inches long, the drone of its wings maddens Ligocristus young in their island nurseries in the hot months when vast clouds of the vampiric insects rise out of the swamps to plague them.