Dragon Flies are Amazing
It may seem like an odd time of year to be thinking or writing about dragon flies but I came across some photos I took last summer and it sparked my imagination.
I became fascinated with dragon flies when I was a boy and scooped up a larva in my bare hands. I received a painful bite that astonished me. My curiosity led me to my middle school library to do some investigating.
Along with cockroaches and silverfish they are insect pioneers, one of the earliest forms to appear. In the prehistoric jungles of the Carboniferous age dragonflies as big as hawks soared through the steaming air. Their fossil remains show they were possessed of wingspans of over 30 inches! The largest insects that ever lived. The largest ones living now have a wingspan of over 7 inches.
They lived on after the dinosaurs past from their time, while cavemen, mound builders, and cliff dwellers evolved into modern man. Its habits and characteristics are still much like the creature from the distant past.
It rushes through the air, scooping up its victims in a basket formed of spine fringed legs, sucking their bodies dry and letting their carcasses fall to the ground all without even slowing down. Its great compound organs of sight may contain as many lenses as the eyes of fifteen thousand men! Its head can turn almost completely around to see below as well as above. Its veined and transparent wings, moving on average twenty-eight times a second, can carry it though the air at speeds approaching sixty miles per hour!
Probably no other insect is as much a creature of the air. It has legs but never walks. They enable it to cling and climb only. But when it leaves the earth, its awkwardness falls away. It becomes the epitome of grace, swooping, turning, zooming at will. It can dive like a jet fighter or hover like a helicopter. Backwards, sideways, up, down and forward. As soon as the sun is above the horizon, the dragonflies are in flight. Only one oriental species hunts at night all others are children of the sun. So true is this that certain species alight if the sun goes behind a cloud.
One time, when I was kayaking down the New River here in Virginia a dragonfly landed on my kayak when the sun went behind a cloud and did not lift off again till the cloud had passed.
Sometimes a female dragonfly will remain in flight while laying her eggs. Other times she will dive completely under water to attach her eggs to the stems or leaves of plants. Her body encased in a film of air which enables her to remain submerged long enough to complete her work. She lays up to 110,000 separate eggs in a single clump. Under normal conditions the many enemies of the dragonfly keep down its numbers.
When they hatch, they are insatiable cannibals, devouring each other and even catching and eating newly emerged adults before their wings have a chance to harden. As they grow older the nymphs are able to overpower tadpoles and small fish. Larger fish hunt them down and they become important food for trout and other game fish.
Most dragonflies pass a year under water as nymphs, larger species are often two years or even three years old before they emerge as aerial insects. During this time, they will molt from ten to fifteen times. The transformation from underwater nymph to arial dragonfly is almost as amazing as if a trout could shed its skin and become a robin.
The shining wings of the dragonfly are supported by a vast network of veins. In a single wing they can have over three thousand cells between the veins. The insect skims through the air with one goal in sight, appeasing an insatiable appetite for living food. I read about an instance where a man had managed to catch a dragonfly and was holding it by its wings, watching the metallic segments of the abdomen moving in and out in rhythm with the insects breathing. Suddenly the body curled upward, the tip reached the dragonflies mouth, and the insect began eating off its own tail. This they will do to appease their craving for food. Gnats and mosquitoes make up the bulk of its diet normally.
After more than one hundred million years on earth, the dragonfly asks no more of life today than it did in the age of the dinosaurs. Sunshine and living insects are the twin needs of its existence. In a world of infinite change its needs have stayed the same.
In the northern states the first cold of the fall kills off these children of the sun. Only the nymphs remain in their underwater home to carry on the chain of life. Lingering old age is virtually unknown in the world of insects. For the dragonfly there is only the swoop of an enemy or the numbing anesthetic of autumn cold.
Death, for it, is also simple and direct.
Well done! If I hadn't already been a fan of dragonflies, this beautiful essay would have converted me.