Your flat out and your to do list is growing by the minute, but unfortunately, so is your headache. And now you've gone from flat out to flattened. Luckily, Panadal extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and they get to work in as little as ten minutes for powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one for panadal speed based on absorption data. Contains paracetamol. Always read the label or leaflet.
Oh hey, it's the male that you haven't opened, sitting on your counter. Ali, Ward, this is ologies, this is dragonflies. You did not know you needed an episode on that, but here we are. Okay, this is h so good. Okay, So this guest is the only dragonfly expert I wanted for the job. I've waited years to chat with her. And she got her undergrad degree at the University of
British Columbia Department of Zoology. She got a PhD at Rutgers in etymology and is currently a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where she serves as chair of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology. Also a professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School. She has been the president of the Worldwide Dragonfly Association and the Entomological Society of America, Big Deals, and the co
founder of Entomologists in Color. She knows dragonflies. We're here to talk about them.
Now.
First off, oda nada sounds a little bit too much like odentology, which is the study of teeth, and I always got that confused. But there's a reason oda nada means toothed ones, and it's the study of these big winged beauties that cause a lot of feelings in us to be discussed. We will do that in a moment, but first, a huge thank you to patrons who support the show at patreon dot com slash Ologies for as
little as a dollar a month. Thank you to everyone in ologies shirts and hats and toats from ologies meerch dot com. We have shorter, kid friendly classroom safe Smologies episodes available wherever you get podcasts or the link in the show notes. Also, thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, all of which I read and they warm my heart and they help the show and I prove it by combing through them and reading a
new one every week. And this is from I should be sleeping twenty five, who wrote in an age of brain rot and doom, scrolling ologies is a pinnacle of hope and brain growth. I should be sleeping twenty five. Thank you for staying awake long enough to write that. So let's get right in this episode, which I'm putting out on the night of the US election. I'm literally recording this as ballots are coming in. Tomorrow is the sixth, It's my birthday. I hope it's a good one.
I hope.
So, But for now, let's get into the differences between a damselfly and a dragonfly. How fast they can dart around, what cultures love and fear them, faking your own death, the scariest babies in the world, Sending dragonflies to space, sci fi aviation inspiration, mating choreography, attracting them to your yard maybe to eat them. How big they were in the age of dinosaurs, and why they were cooler than dinosaurs? With scholar, dragonfly expert, and thus owatologist, doctor Jessica Ware.
My name is Jessica Ware, and I use she her pronouns.
And you're in New York, right, yeah? Yes?
And what is it like working with the museum is that Bonker.
It's awesome. I love it. I worked at Records for ten years as a professor before coming here, and I loved it there too, in a different way. But the museum is kind of it's like than to do. It's like the best. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing I can't imagine a better job. It's really really fun.
Did you go there when you were younger? Did you have like a history of going when you were or when you would come to the city, Like, what's your history with the museum?
Well, I'm from Canada, so I went to the Royal Ontario Museum, the rom in Toronto, that's our naturalster museum. Took my twin and I there quite often. I remember seeing a gorilla diorama. It's like etched in my mind, this gorilla diorama. So I know I went there when I was short enough that I could barely see inside the diorama.
So doctor Ware's first visit to New York's iconic American Museum of Natural History was she was a wee one. It was about twenty five years ago, but she did a postdoc there working on termite evolution, and she says she was nervous to apply for a full time position at the museum because she thought she'd be a university professor. But she just has undergrads in the summer rather than throughout the year.
And I certainly never, ever, in a million years, thought that I would work here. It kind of feels like the same, but just with more time fulfilled work and more encouragement for field work.
Obviously, I love bugs a lot, so I'm like, the notion of being doing field work and getting to see bugs in person as part of your job is like, what, that's a job that's so exciting.
Yeah, there's a lot of them out there, and we do a lot of stuff in the Arctic, you know, sixty eight sixty nine degrees latitude, and then we do a lot of stuff from the tropics, and they're both amazing, like insect phonic insect communities, but they're very different. I have the temperate Arctic and tropical stuff.
It's fun speaking of location, location, location, Where do dragonflies live? Are there dragonflies in the Arctic? What's their range?
Like? Yeah, there's dozens and punt dozens in the Arctic. There's six that are kind of whole Arctic that have a circumpolar distribution, but there's over forty I think species that live north of the Arctic circle. In general, I would say like dragonflies and damselflies are found globally everywhere except for it Arctica.
So the upper Arctic reaches of the globe, but not in the snow and ice at the bottom of the globe. Although the globe's physition, really I don't know why it matters. We could be float in any which way, you know what I mean.
I've collected dragonflies in Namibia, which is a very dry kind of desert y environment. Like you can find them in deserts, you can find them in mountainous regions, temperate, top arctic kind of you name it, they're there. They've been around for a really long time, so they've basically fit themselves into a lot of different niche spaces.
I feel like I have a flim flam in my mind that they were at one point the size of like a couch cushion, and I feel like that is not correct. How big prehistorically were they So the proto.
Kind of odineta, the pre dragonflies and damselflies, they're a group we call griffin flies. Commonly, they're in this family meganority. They flew during the carbon differst period, so like three hundred and fifty million years ago, and those were big that I just had, Like each wing was like thirty seven centimeters, so it's like it's a pretty big size individual.
So each wing was almost fifteen inches long, and they were total about two feet across, weighing about a pound, so about as large as a small hawk or like a modern day crow.
But crown odinate, so they're not modern, uh dragonflies. Modern dragonflies and amplifies are younger. I think, you know, fifty and twenty five million years old or so, so a.
Full one hundred million years later.
And depending on what you're measuring for size, right, there's either megalar prepists, which is a damsel fly that weighs almost nothing, but it has a pretty big wingspan and a very long, very very thin threadlike abdomen because it lays its eggs in tree holes. Oh, so that's a very big one in terms of just like the total
measurements of centimeters. But then in terms of mass probably it would be pedalarity, which are a different family in anasop for the dragonflies, and some of the pedalarity that live in Australia. Pedalara is one pedlar gigant. Yet it's got that name for a reason. I mean it's like a good size. It's hefty, you know, it's not as long as megular papists, but it's it weighs quite a bit.
So depending on if you're going for like size in terms of lengthen width or size in terms of mass, then those are the two kind of biggest ones that we have nowadays.
When did they go from the gryffin flies to dragonflies?
And also who's naming them?
Because named after gryffins and dragons is like pretty baller, It's like pretty great.
Yeah, those are some good names. I think they think that, like there was an English translation from a European language, like a Slavic language for devil fly, with this myth that there was like a devil's horse that took to the sky and maybe that's how the name dragonfly came about. Well they're not sure. So there's like a lot of common names for each of the families. Diners are the name the common name for Ashnity, and they have an
oppositor that is sort of long. Although to be honest, it's not as long as some other types of dragonflies. But anyways, some people thought it look like a sewing needle because they lay their eggs and plant material, so they're called diners. But a lot of the dams of flies are related to their color. I mean, they're all very colorful, but there's jewel wings and bluets for some of the dams of fly. Names and the common names
very in general sort of country back country. Although the dragonfly community is pretty tight, so I think they're trying to like come up with like more universal common names across the orders and across the order, across the families and such.
Are there damselfly people and dragonfly people and do they fight?
So there's, like I think odinatology in general, really tight community, really good vibes only, but you tend to focus on one or the other, although there are some exceptions. But my specialty are dragonflies, and my colleagues have buyb He really focuses on the damsel flies. I think there's a lot. I mean, there's three thousands of each of those groups, right, the three thousand dams of fly, three thousand dragonflies ish
and they do slightly different things. They all have fresh water namps, but the damselflies have gills that are external and the dragonflies have internal gills. Dragonflies are kind of stocky bodied, and some of them have lost their overpositors, so they lay their eggs on the surface of water. None of the damselflies do that. They all they their eggs and plants, so I feel like already like they're kind of a little bit different.
So both damsel and dragonflies have an equal number of species, like a whopping three thousand each, and both their bibis or their nymphs sometimes called naiads, live in water, and we're going to get to those absolute killing machines in a bit. But again, dragonflies have internal gills and kind of fatter bodies. Both very cool. But let's say that a damsel flies kind of like a coop or a sedan while the other is an suv.
And I'm like firmly on team dragonfly. But I've published some stuff with like Olafink, and I published on Megala prepis on that really big damselfly. I mean, there's a lot of interesting things in damsel flies. I guess I just like I really love dragonflies.
Do damselfly people do their feelings get hurt when people call damselflies dragonflies when there's the smaller, skinnier ones and everyone's like, oh, dragonfly. Do you think there's a damselfly researcher who's just looking at their hands and wistfully walks home crying.
I think a lot of that's just used the word dragonfly. They mean both. But in general, if you said dragonflies, people think that you mean all of it in Nata and yeah, so I think they would. They would just think it was normal. They wouldn't they wouldn't be sad.
Their life cycle is really fascinating to me. The nymphs are bonkers from what I understand, and they look so different from the adults. Can you tell me a little bit about what their infancy and adolescence is like before they become the dragonflies that we see around.
Yeah, for sure. Well, So, females lay their eggs either in plant material and a pittic over position that's called or on the surface of the water or the mud exophytic over position that's.
Called damsel flies, and no fittic implants. Dragonflies exophittic, not in plants, and in.
Neither case the egg hatches when it developed in freshwater. There's like a couple of examples of things that we think are a semi terrestrial where they've been found kind of like walking in the moss around freshwater. But in general they're inhabiting freshwater. There's a couple that have burrows, like some of the pedalarity that I talked about, they actually have burrows. And there's Somatachlora and Emerald in North
America that utilizes crayfish burrows. But like in general, the eggs kind of settle somewhere in the water column or down at the bottom of the on the substrate. The nymphs hatch, and if they're juvenile damsel flies, then they have these external gills that they used to breathe with. And if they're dragonflies, then they have these internal gills, these rectal pads that they used to breathe with.
Yes, rectal gills. Nymphs can stick their dump trucks in the air and breathe through their butts. These ass gasping babies are hungry. No one is safe.
They eat each other, They eat other aquatic insects, the mosquito larvae, dabs, and fly larvae. May fly larvae cainterfly livery things like that. They can also eat small fish like minnows, and they can eat tadpoles and depending on the taxon, some of them develop in like six weeks. There's a migratory dragonfly called Pentella flavescence. The global wanderer or wandering glider are two common names people use for it,
and it develops really fast in like six weeks. In general, it kind of often takes advantage of like temporary water that pulls up after rain, so it kind of makes sense it would be selected to develop kind of quickly.
And then on the.
Other extreme, there are things that develop over years and in some extreme examples people have said decades where the juveniles basically are in fresh water for quite a long time, kind of slowly molting and then becoming an adult. So in the arctic systems that we are doing a lot of sampling, and those juveniles are actually frozen in the
wintertime and they freeze in thaw freezing thought. And even in the temperate systems like in northern Ontario, like or Minana lives, the lake freezes solids right, so the nymphs are either burrowing down into the substrate or in part freezing. So just like for all insects, right, there's these like rise and fall of hormones, So juvenile hormone like those things kind of rise and fall, and then when the timing is right, the hormone levels are right, then they
have their final molt to adulthood. And what happens in that case is they have a trigger to kind of crawl out of the water, and they usually cling to like some veg or like a boat house or a dock or like whatever thing that they can cling to, and then the adult kind of pulls itself out of this larval skin, which are called xuvia. I think in Europe they call them imagines, but anyways, are those are
kind of left behind. So often you can find axuvia or imagines kind of in the veg around fresh water.
These exsuvia, in my unasked for opinion, are gorgeous to behold. And if you look closely in the summer around lakes or ponds, you might find papery, empty ghost shells of dragon fine nymphs, and they look a little bit like
cicada molts if you've ever seen one of those. And these little insect husks get their name eksuvia from meaning things stripped from a body, and I like to imagine that the young dragonfly was like felt raptured, just ascended to fly through the air and then left their exuvia behind like pants.
Then the adult has to take some time it's wings develop in while they're crumpled up in these wing pads while they're larvae or nymphs. And then when they become an adult, they kind of shunt their hem on the fat and they kind of stretch their wings out. They slowly dry and we call harden up when they're first emerged with a very soft body, very vulnerable, and then once they've hardened up, then they take off and they
eat as much as they can. They build up fat stores, and then they're they're adults, and they just do things adults do, which is meaning dispersing and you know, laying eggs.
Do they even eat as adults or do they do all their eating as little like hungry hungry hippos under the water.
No, they eat a lot as adults, so do depending on the text on. Some of them have a lot of spines on their tibia, and they actually are kind of like bringing food in towards their mouth as they're flying. Often if you see dragonflies, they do this behavior called hawking, or they'll kind of be flying. Often you see it, like if you live in suburbia, like over you know a lawn, or if you're near a meadow in a more rural setting, you see them kind of flying often
at desk or in the middle of the afternoon. That's what they're doing, kind of gliding back and forth, just eating, and they have to build up quite a bit of fat stores, and they use those fat stores for their flight, which is really energetically expensive. But then also like when they're mating, some dragonflies and damsel flies are territorial, and so they do these mating kind of dances or these flights competitions, and you need to have a lot of
fat stores for that. Often what dragonflies will do is they'll en damsel flies is that they'll just fly until they'll use up their fat stores and then they just kind of drop into the water. They did so like in their best interests, they would be selected to kind of be constantly eating to keep their fat stores high.
So they eat and they fly doing cardio until they get fatally shredded, and then they just have a burial, let's see, or at pond. I had no idea that they were out there hunting too. How long typically, I know it must range from like a day to like ten years or something. But how long does dragonfly live once it is an adult? How long is it out flying around?
So it's always around the same. So the juvenile stage can vary six weeks to maybe decades, maybe two decades.
Who knows, right, that's bonkers.
But I think like five years would be like an oldish And there's a couple of extreme outliers, but often there one or two years, you know, three or four years.
That's just the nymph stage, either from six weeks to a decad.
But then the adult stage is usually like one hot summer, right, So usually in temperate regions it's like from May to maybe October. There's a couple of examples individuals that were around for several months, but it's definitely not usually more than a year, and it would definitely be less than a year in most cases. So the adult stage, they really have this like solitary goal of dispersing, mating and
laying their eggs like that that's their whole thing. It's not really doing growth or maintenance.
Right, So it's like a longer adolescence and a shorter adulthood essentially.
Oh yeah, for sure, with the exception of, like I said, the wandering glider or global wanderer, the pentelifa essence, it's six weeks development time and then it lives for a couple of months. So that's one where it's reverse. But in the majority of cases than the juvenile is a longer stage than the adult. For a lot of dragonflies, Stam supplies.
I feel like I know people with dragonfly tattoos. I know people who see dragon.
Do you I have one?
Gorgeous How long have you had it?
Uh, maybe ten years or something like that. I've had it for a while.
So doctor Ware pushed up her long sleeved shirt and showed me what looked like a silhouette of a dragonfly. Of course it was a beautiful artwork, so on brand. You had already been studying dragonflies at that point. Yeah, yeah, you were in it. You're like seeing dragonfly committed.
Actually I have a damsel fly. I don't have a dragonfly.
I was wrong, a damselfly tattoo. This was surprising.
It's an ebony jewel wing collapterrics maculata. But I picked this one because the wings themselves are like black in color, and so I thought it would be easy for a tattoo artist to do it without Sometimes, like the venation is very important. It's Karlai with like flight behavior, So if they did the veins wrong on the tattoo, I would know that it was wrong that it couldn't fly right.
So I was like a little bit anxious about having a tattoo that I was gonna dislike afterwards if the venation was a right.
So collopterix mechilata means beautiful wing. And this ebony jewel wing damsel fly has a slender, metallic blue green body looks like a sports car paint chop, and wings that look almost opaque, like a velvety black with subtly visible vey nation.
That's what I was going to ask you.
How many times do you see dragonfly tattoos and things in pop culture that are anatomically not right.
Well, most of the time people put really long and tenny, and dragonflies and damselflies have very very very small almost like not visible and tenny. They're very very very small. So if you have something with long antenna. It's usually an antlon or something like that. So a lot of people they're like, oh, I have this dragonfly tattooer, and then they show it to me and I'm like, oh, it's an ant line or it's like a derraptra, But
of course I don't say that because heavy root. So I'm just like, oh, that's very cool, because I think it's cool. They want to get an ad a tattoo, but if it has long antennae. I actually said that to my tattooer this when he was doing this tattoo. The first sketch. I was like, oh no, no, no, antenna gotta go.
No.
No, They're like, my insects have antenna, and I'm like, no, dragonflies and damseflies, you wouldn't see them. They're almost like, no, we can't have them on there. I'm not gonna have inter rapt attestee.
No.
I mean not that they're not cool too, but no.
I love that that timetoo artists has probably thought about you every single time they've seen a dragonfly.
Yeah.
He said he.
Had just been a tattoo for his wife and he was like, oh, thank goodness, I didn't put long antenna on hers because she didn't want them. And I was like, yeah, it's very.
Good, get very good.
What about what was your ambassador bug species? Was it a dragonfly or what got you out looking around for bugs?
Well? I spent a lot of time like near water, because I lived in Canada and we spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents and they lived on a lake like Muscoca, and so we saw a lot of dragonflies and damsel flies for sure, But I didn't I didn't think I was gonna ever study them. To be honest, I was curious about them, but like we were kind of curious about the natural world, I would say,
like in general. But then when I went to give me Seawa to University of Fish, Columbia for my undergrad and I was going to do marine biology, but I ended up switching into entomology. My first undergrad experience doing field work was working on messistic aster, which is sister to that big one that I talked about, meguelaprepis. It's a damselflyning and it lays its eggs and bermelia plants
and it was really fun. But I still was like, oh, like this stuff is so cool, there's no way I could ever contribute to this because all the cool stuff has been done. There's no way. So I'll just go do something very practical and work on food security and maybe do biological control. So that's what I went to grad school to do. But then I ended up not really loving entomopathogenic nematodes as much as you think you would. You think you'd be like, wow, that's a page turner.
Turns out wasn't turning a page for me. And then, thank goodness, Mike May, my hero, my late advisor, unfortunately passed away last year. But he was one of the world's dragonfly X where it's a foremost odinatologist, and I switched into his lab and he said to me, what are you talking about? There are so many unanswered questions for odinates, like so many, like many many lifetimes worth of work to do. And his encouragement was really wonderful.
That's so sweet and so interesting how paths can change just in an instant from someone that you meet, or from one thing that a person says, And that changed the course of the field just by encouraging someone to be like, no hop in here.
Yeah, we got a lot of questions.
I mean, Mike I think changed odinatology. Well, he certainly changed the way that I even looked at science because he was exactly that person that was always like, oh, you want to come here, let me hold the door open for you, you know. And he made a community that everyone wanted to be part of, where everyone was able to participate. Like, if you like dragonflies, you're in. That's only requirements that you have to sort of like them. And I think the whole community was so much better
for that philosophy. But if that's your grounding philosophy, everyone who wants to join can join. I mean, no wonder, it's such a great community.
Yeah, And what are what are odentotologists studying? What are you looking at now?
It's a lot, I mean it varies. Right, Mike wasn't wrong. There's so much left to be done right, so much that we don't know. With some collaborators Seth, I mentioned John Vincent, Rob Paul, there's a few of us. We work together with my post doc Lacy and some graduate students. We're trying to get like the tree of life of dragonflies down.
She says that by dragonflies she means both them and damselflies, and they're working on specifically sequencing as many species as possible to figure out who's related to whom and where their tree of life branched in these different directions.
In my lab, I'm really interested in reproductive evolution, so the evolution of like male reproductive structures, female reproductive structures. Some people in other labs are interested in vision or like ops and pigments, or others are inter really interested in particular types of behavior or nymph for larval behavior. I guess it really varies, like you name it, somebody's working on it, female storage organs, color, structural pigmentation, the
chemical composition of wings. The nymphs, they as you mentioned, look very different from the adult and they feed with this thing called a labial mass, which kind of like is this mouth part that kind of shoots outwards and grabs the prey and then brings in towards their mandibles.
Well, that's terrifying.
Sebastian Boosa and others are like looking at the functional morphology of that structure. So I think, like, as you look globally, there's a lot of people working on very very cool questions, and I feel like they're all complementary, like they all are fitting together to tell this story of, like, you know, the last three hundred million years of evolution for this group.
Is there a group text for.
I mean kind of there's like an ode at a list serve, I guess. And there's lots of dragonfly groups. But there's like a Worldwide Dragonfly Association, the WDA. We have dragonfly meetings every two years, and so that's a good chance for people to kind of come together. There's a Black Odontology group has a lot of people from
West Africa, but really people globally. There's this Society ad Analogical Latin Americano, which is for Central and South America, and everyone collaborates together, which is wonderful.
Can I ask you some questions from patrons about those facets?
Oh?
Yeah, sure, these are listeners who know you're coming on.
They have dragonfly questions.
Anything that comes up in terms of charity or anything associated with Mike too in his honor that you'd want to donate to.
Oh, that's very nice. Mike was the former president of the World Dragonfly Association, so was I, and so that might be a good one. That's a five oh one C and the mission and goal is to really promote the study of dragonflies and damsel flies worldwide, and so any donations that go to them help to They have a a journal that they publish and then they also use it for funding for students to go to conferences.
This dragon by meaning which is so fun, So every two years, so that might be a good one to Okay, that's great, thank you.
So each episode we donate to a cause of the ologist choosing, and this week it's going to the World Dragonfly Association in honor of doctor Michael Love May Literally this guy's middle name was Love and I found his obituary and it describes him as a fair, compassionate and caring mentor, a scholar and a naturalist, but also a gentle kind man who spoiled dogs, took children seriously, and loved his wife with great devotion. As a friend, he
was amusing, tolerant, and loyal. As a father above all perceptive, and as a beloved husband, he was thoughtful and generous, a partner eager to share the world. So a donation will be made in his name to the World Dragonfly Association. Thanks to sponsors of the show, Your Flat Out and Your To do list is growing by the minute, but unfortunately, so is your headache.
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Okay, let's dip in your questions Damsel's Drug Flies. Patrons YouTube can submit questions, even audio questions to get your voice on the show by contributing to patreon dot com slash Ologies. It starts at a dollar a month. Now, this first question comes from patrons Hope J and first time question asker Turner Pierce. So you mentioned you were looking at reproductive structures, and Hope J and Turner Pierce
wanted to know is your sexual dimorphism. Is there a way to distinguish a male and female dragonfly?
Absolutely, So what you'll do is, when you're looking at the dragonfly, you want to look at the base of the abdomen. So males are unique in that they have two sets of reproductive structures. So they have a penis at the tip of their abdomen from which sperm is ejaculated and they put it into a second penis which is at the base of their abdomen. H two of them,
and this second penis is called the visicas formalice. It's a sperm pump, and they use that second penis to transfer the sperm into the female, so it's indirect sperm transfer, but they also use that second penis to displace the previous male sperm. Because females can store sperm, she has both short term and long term sperm storage organs, the
sperm atika and the burst of copula tricks. So males use the secondary penis to either scrape out the previous male sperm or like pack deeply in the previous male sperm, like displace it in some way, and then they transferm they're ejaculate, just.
Gonna kind of move this out of the way, like if you went to a potluck and you threw away someone else's cast role or just hid it in a cabinet.
And so you can look at it under a scanning electron microscope, and it's very cool because a lot of variation on a theme like selection has acted, so lots of different species have slightly different things and look like a scoop, some looks like ragged claws. Like it really varies.
Ah.
But if you don't have a microscope a scanning left her microscope and you're just holding a dragonfly, or if you're just up close looking at it, if it's perch somewhere, just look at the base of their abdomen near where it meets the thorac and if there's a bump there, that's the penis, right, Because the females have a very smooth ventral part of their abdomen. There's no ridges, there's
no bumps there. So if you see something that looks like a little bump or a little notch kind of sticking at the base of the first second third kind of segment of the abdomen, then that's the secondary penis, and you know you have a male. There's other things that you sometimes not all things have color dimorphisms, but some do. In a lot of dams of flies, there's variation in the wing color pattern between males and females.
So this tattoo that I have is Collopteris maculata, and the males have completely black wings, but the females it's dusky and not completely black. So there's like variations like that. And then in a lot of males, they actually have like a waxy with the colored prunescence, like a waxy secretion that coats their whole body that they get with age with maturity, and that gives them a bluish hue.
So often males and females, for example, the eastern pond hop is bright green as a male and female, but over time, as a male's older, they se creeped this wax over their body. And then they end up looking completely blue.
It's like graying at the temple, sort of like okay, silver fox almost yeah, blue fox.
Oh man. What about colors in general?
And many of you including Rowan Tree, Kyla Ce Mouse, Pakston eating dog Hair for a Living, Earl of Gramlkin, Rachel Pistacco, Charlotte Parkinson, Jesse Meeks, Adam T Burns, Rachel Fallon, Airy Fox, Popsicle Emperor, Flazitron, Brian Shenanigan's Hope, Jay Devin Jay Shay, Jackie g Nicole s and Alta Sparks also asked about this as well as Turner. Pearce wanted to know are they all colorful and irid? Doesn't that coloring
make them more appealing to predators? Alissa Hoff Sedoni s A bunch of different people wanted to know why are they so colorful? Alyssa asked are their colors for specific reason for mating? For predators? Scare away reasons?
Those are good questions, I would say, so, first of all, are they all colorful?
No?
Not really, most of them are. There's two types of color. There's structural color where there's like bumps on their cuticle, and when light bounces off of it, it's perceived as a color. Often the metallic colored ones are like that, and that's a structural color, and the ones that have
structural color. It's very cool because in the fossils that we have, not all, but in some of the fossils that we have, the compression fossil also has the same bumps and rugosities, so then when the light bounces off of it, it looks like it's a metallic green, which
is very cool. But then there's also just pigment granules in their epithelial cells, and some dragonflies that's how their coloration exist from these pigment granules, and the pigment can vary, right, Some have melonains, some muma crumbs, like, there's very various types of pigment, and so there are some things that fly at night, like the shadow dragons is the common name of this genus neuro Cordulia that flies when it's too dark to kind of read a newspaper, and they
are not very colorful. They're very drab, as you might expect because they're flying at night. Right, Dragonflies don't have great vision at night. They're very good at seeing things in the day, but not as good at seeing things at night, and so I guess there's just been selection for a loss of the bright color. And they're kind of dravish brown in color.
So those metallic greens and blues aren't pigment based, but rather the shape and the texture of the kitan that makes up their exoskeleton, just like how many blue bird feathers are structural and you may have learned that in the Plumology episode about feathers, which will link in the shutouts. But other colors are pigment based, kind of like the color of our hair and skin.
And in terms of why they're colorful, a lot of the patterns that you see are for sexual signaling, so male like the patterns in their wings might be for signaling male signaling to other males, males and females communicating to each other. But then there's also color patterns that
relate to thermal regulation. So males and females are able to kind of have their pigment granules migrate up and down in their epithelial cells to give them like a bright color or a dark color, and the ideas maybe that the dark color allows them to absorb more heat and the bright color to kind of shed more heat. There's some idea, yeah, that maybe this waxy pronescence is to prevent desiccation anti aging technique here. There are others.
Pleathemasidia is a good one. The white tail where the abdomen itself is actually like a kind of a bright white color, and some people have suggested that perhaps that's to allow it to kind of it's a perture and it often perches out in the sun, and so that allows it to kind of shint a lot of heat out of its body. So I think there's a combination of factors in terms of whether or not it can
make you more visible or less visible to predators. I mean, Amanda Wispeld did her thesis on this damselfly called rjapicalis, which actually changes its color right after mating. Males actually change their color to being in a dark phase versus bright phase, and she argued that it had a lot to do with predation, right, so it allows them to be less visible.
And this is also a flex So.
I mean, I think there's a lot of possibilities, and some of those might be happening at the same time, so more than one of those things could be happening at the same time them a regulation, sexual signaling and avoidance of predators.
Going back to reproduction, so many people. Jesse Crawford said, what's the deal with the way they mate? Which is a broad question, but what's the deal? Jesse says, I've seen what I assume is the male with the end of his tail inserted into the back of the female's head. What's going on? How are they actually getting it on? Devin Naples wants to know when I see two dragonflies fluttering about attached to each other, are they doing what I think they're doing? Are they making will be dragonfly
sexy times? A lot of people want to know what's going on there, key Lime Pie, Ranial Mandre, Bjorn fred Berg, Rachel Guthrie, Mallory Skinner, Sophia A. Clover, and Alissa Hoff, who asked do they do butt stuff? I see them stuck together by their butts. Cheesemonger wanted to know why do they appear to keep banging while flying? Seems fun, but Jennifer Frow said, why not land and do that with storm? Adding seems like a hard way to do it. Let's get into it.
So the heart shape wheel that you see of the males and females together. We call it the copulatory wheel, and that indeed is usually males and females doing mating ritt like as broadly defined. Right, Often what they're doing while they're flying around isn't necessarily the male ejaculating, right because member males make the sperm and the tip of their abdomen in that first penis put it into the
sperm pump. But then before any sharing of their genetic information, they do the sperm displacement, so the scraping right.
Ah.
That yes, So when males want to mate with a female, they have these appendages at the tip of their abdomen, called the anal appendages or the claspers, and they grab the female behind the back of her head, on the back of her thorax. In some damsel flies, there's actually pits in the back of the female's thorax, and the males fit their appendages into these pits, and it's kind of like a lock and key mechanism and a lot of ordinates. It's not like that the males just kind
of grab wildly. Sometimes they do damage the eyes because the males can walk on the back of the female's eyes, and you can see female with damage to the back of her eyes because omitidia are fragile and they can break with the tarsi and the tarsal claws kind of locking on them.
So this copulatory wheel, it looks like two dragonflies locked in kind of a heart shape, but actually it's the female of the species getting her head hooked and maybe her eyes clawed while mating. I don't want to talk about it or think about it today, but at least female dragonflies have options.
So the male clasps the female and then the female has a choice, right she can bring her abdomen up to the secondary genitalia right at the base of his abdomen for the sperm transfer or not. And sometimes you see males holding females and she does not bring her adomen up. In theory, with the lock and key mechanism, if the key doesn't fit in the lock properly, then maybe the female won't bring her admin up because it's a sign that it's not the right species. Right, those
are kind of species specific locking keys. Well, like I said, not all ordinates have a lock and key mechanism. So when the female and the males enter this copulatory wheel. They can either stay purchase somewhere, or they can fly together. Sometimes they fly together where both of them are flapping their wings, but in other species only the male flaps his wings, which really affects his white behavior.
Right.
Sometimes males and females after the sperm is transferred, they let go of each other and the male will either like piece i'm out no contact guarding, or the males will do what's called non contact guarding. Will they'll stay near the female while she lays her eggs, and they'll chase away other males because of course, if another male grabs a female, he'll just scrape out the male's sperm, right and he wants to assure interperternity. That's called non
contact guarding, where they just chase away other males. And then the other option is contact guarding, and that's where the males and females stay attached to each other right through as the female's laying her eggs.
So they can piece i'm out. They can be a bouncer to the female kind of on the lookout, or they can just stay attached.
There's a couple of wacky exceptions called interrupted and there more males will like let go of a female grab her again, let her femal grab her again, But those are It's more common that it's either like no guarding whatsoever, non contact guarding, or it's contact guarding this tandem.
So how long does it take between receiving the sperm and laying an egg is it? Are they able to do it like quicker than you can get a pizza, or are they is he guarding her for like days?
Oh? Yeah, like quicker than you can get a pizza for sure. People used to think that maybe like the last sperm in was the first sperm out that she would fertilize her eggs with. We don't think that's necessarily true anymore. But she's able to lay eggs pretty much right away. Some dragonflies have their eggs ripen in batches. This has work that Camilla cock and urintilan did. They lay their eggs in batches, But other dragonflies, the majority
of them have their eggs ripe all the time. So as soon as she has sperms she can lay her eggs. She needs to find suitable habitat That's often why you see dragonflies mating at water, because then they're right there and then the waters are there. And they can lay their eggs.
What about her overpositor?
Is that something that you can also see if you happen to have a dragonfly land on you.
Sure, it depends on the dragonfly. So if it's a damselfly, they all will have an ovipositor. If it's a dragonfly in the Darner family or the asinity, the pedalarity, which are the pedal tails or the cordula gastrity, they have pretty honk and they're called spike tails because their overpositor is really long.
Imagine a skinny little fingernail at the tip of your behind.
It's like hello those ones, and you definitely will see the overpositor looks like a small little blade in some cases serrated. It's a series of gun apopthesies that kind of fit together in this interlocking device. It's like a little knife that cuts a hole in plant material to put the eggs in. But if you were to catch the most species rich, two groups are the liberal looidea and the gomfity. The club tails are the gomfity and
the liberaloidea are things like skimmers and emeralds. Both of those groups have lost their overpositor, so you wouldn't see it. You would just see like if you flip them over, you would see what's called a vulver lamina kind of just like a little flap, and they square out their eggs like in a clump from that little flap.
They don't even need an overpositor, like it's fine.
No, no overpositive because they're not using plant material. So you really only need the overpositor to put it into plants.
And then do those eggs hatch in the plants and then crawl and find water and then live their life as adolescents when they are in plant material.
Yeah, they I mean, it's pretty fast. They don't lay them like up in a tree or anything like that. Like they're laid right at the water surface. And then you can sometimes even see on plants the scars where the eggs have been laid.
Oh that's awesome.
So well, usually damsel flies are more delicate looking.
The largest of.
The odinates is a damsel fly, so the smallest is actually a dragonfly, so that's a little flippy floppy. And skimmers our dragonflies like the bright red ones you might see, but skimmers are called chasers in some countries. Now darners again, have that long overpositor and are super fast flyers. But now you can just go get a bug book and start kind of gacking at all of them. But if you are less into outside and books and more into
inside and screens. We had media questions from Guido Fairy, Mamma Bee and Dad Aussie, Scott Hanley and Amanda loves Kurt questions about pop culture. Oh yeah, someone asked, this is very specific. Claire Ritchie said, carry Colby Voice. A dragonfly, a dragonfly.
Don't eat the entire thing. I would give you one thousand dollars.
I swear to you right now.
I can't believe you're just said dot.
I ask you guys, I can eat a.
Boe RuPaul's drag Race fans need to know our dragonflies edible. Apparently, have you heard anything about drag race and eating dragonflies?
Uh no, but I'm here for it, and I will just say dragonflies are absolutely edible. If you were ever to eat an insect, that's the one that I would eat. I mean, I've eaten a lot of insects in my lifetime, but dragonflies are Their thorax is just pure mussel, right, So they actually don't have a lot of fat. They're like always flying right, burning their fat stores and their muscle, their thorax. The entire thing is just one, like just
blocks of muscle. So they're high protein thing. If that's the like, if it was me and I was wanting to eat something, I would break the wings off. I would probably take the adumn off because I don't need that, and I would just eat the thorax and you would have a little protein snack.
It's like shrimps, sort of kind of shrimpy, maybe a little bit if it's muscle.
I don't know.
Maybe, I mean I often think of the insects tastes kind of nutty. I actually don't eat srim because I'm allergic to shrimp. So I maybe that's what shrimp tastes like. Maybe timp tastes like nuts. I don't know.
Okay, So I looked into this for us, and yes, you can eat eat dragonflies, but check the species first, try not to eat an endangered one. Now, as we discussed in our entomophagy Anthropology episode about eating bugs, the most humane way to kill them is to lower their temperature. You can put them in the freezer. And in general, people say eating some raw bugs should be fine, but
if you can cook them, do that. And for more on how and why humans do eat dragonflies, you can see the pretty new twenty twenty four study Edible dragonflies and damsel flies order Odonata as Human Food, a comprehensive review which states that edible insects are rich in nutritional value, with protein, fat, carbohydrate, vitamins, and minerals at levels that meet human nutritional requirements, and that folks who have eaten dragonflies say they taste a lot like shellfish due to
the external skeletons, while others describe the flavor as quote a meaty vegetable and a bit nutty.
Especially when roasted.
But the study does warrant that some of the same allergens in shellfish are present in other vertebrates like bugs, so if you're allergic to shellfish, be careful. There also heavy metal toxins from water sources could be present and accumulate, so if Odonata are to be eaten in big quantities, farming is the way to go, and again, cooking it better in case their specteria. I don't know, I'm not
your doctor, but be smart about it. Don't just pluck one off a piece of fabric on a reality show and raw dog it for money straight down the gullet. Now I read one culinary message board that said, they are, in fact like a soft shell crab, pretty darn tasty, and if you ask me better for the planet, then a bunch of cleared rainforests filled with sad, farting cows.
So you could and should eat them.
And well we'll get to conservation in a second. But a few people, Guido Faery, you're and fred Berg laur Pemberton wanted to know, in Laurie's words, ornithopters in Dune? Could that be a real thing? There are helicopters that look like dragonflies in Dune. I'm sure if you've seen them, but you watch Dune and you're like, those are huge dragonflies.
Yeah, they're bonkers.
Do people send you so many articles and pictures of them when Dune movies come out?
Yeah? Absolutely, yes, one yes. And there also was the name of a spacecraft that didn't look like a dragonfly, but it was named after dragonfly. And my mention's got all messed up because of all these dragonfly things, and I was like, oh my gosh, everyone's talking about dragonflies space.
Okay, so I look this up. According to NASA, Dragonfly is this quad copter drone designed to explore the chemistry and the habitability of Saturn's moon Titan. And I'm thinking when they're building it, I hope they refer to it as a naiad because how cuy would that be? Like a little nymph. Also, if it's like it's odor Nata namesake, then it would be powered by mosquito larvae and worms, and if it's a baby, it could collect them by unhinging its hell mouth jaw, which dragonfly iads do They
toss it out like a javelin. Well, it's still attached to their face, and then some of them have pincers that capture their fuel and then bring it back to their mouth. It's bonkers. It's what Odonata nymphs can do, and it is terrifying and inspiring, which brings us to a question about technology from patrons Ron Sam Jesse, Prawford, Club Jamie and Thomas Paine, who wanted to know are dragonfly is a model for future human flight?
Yeah?
I mean humans have for a long time taken inspiration by dragonfly flight. You know, dragonflies do a lot of the things that we want to do when we try and design aircraft that are you know, stealthy or energetically inexpensive, right, you know, ratio long and thin wings are really good for long distance flight and for fast flight. The turning radius is affected by the shape and camber and pitch and yaw, all the things that we have to worry
about when we think about flight. Dragonflies have been you know, presumably having selection act on that for millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. So I think humans have looked to dragonfly flight quite a lot. But then certainly it's inspiration for sci fi. I mean, it's hard to imagine a better kind of model for something that is very good at targeted flight. They do insant interception style predation, so they're able to kind of maneuver very well in
and amongst vegetation. They're able to catch prey very quickly. I mean, it's kind of an ideal fire.
And speaking of that, gnomes loarmer. How does their flying work? And can they just hover? So many people.
Wanted to know.
First time question asker Sarah Philo wanted to know why do they fly like that? So chaotic and unpredictable? It seems like they're turned so fast and I blink and then they're gone. A bunch of you wanted to know this, and I will say, your name's very swiftly. Cuddlecuttle, Isabelle the Clerk, Rachel gj Wyatt, Olivia Callas, launchingly fully, Pimenaz, Nathan Marion, Collina Anderson Theta and Odysseus floor Borerwinkle, and Laurie Pemberton, who asked what's the top speed of dragonfly
can reach? Oliver call Us want to know how many times a minute do they beat their wings?
Do we know?
Are they like near hummingbirds in terms of how fast they beat the wings? But yeah, how what's going on with the flying?
So it really depends on the texam. So some things fly very high up in the air column, they fly very fast. There's like reports of darners that can fly thirty miles an hour, for example, And then there are other things that barely flutter, you know, that never leave the pond from which they emerge, and we tend to think of them as being quite poor fliers. People tend to think of damsel flies as being kind of poor
fliers than dragonflies. Although there are things like that megalaprepis that big giant helicopter damsel fly, the one that lays its sikes in tree holes and it flies. I've seen it fly. It's really hard to catch. I mean it looks like it's just barely there when you try and catch it. Man, it is really very very difficult. Better
luck next time. Presumably, like the ancestor to dragonflies, to mother and dragonflies, was probably not a very good flyer, we think, just based on its wing shape, size and
the wing venation patterns that we see. But then over time dragonfly flight got quite good, and we think that some of the selection probably was because initially there was nothing in the sky except for ordinate light things, right, But as the sky started to fill up with species and there was like birds and frogs and terosaurs and things like that, there would have been selection on them to be able to maneuver very well, and there would
have also been selection to kind of have optimized you know, speed and performance and so part of what we see when you look at the dragonfly wing, the wing venation is very noticeable, right, something that people notice. Tiffany made those Tiffany lamps based on dragonfly wings, right. But the more dense. The wing veins are the stiffer the wing is, and the spars or the wing veins are the more
bendy it is. But there's also a bunch of this tissue called resonant, which is a really spongy tissue that makes it kind of has elastic properties. There's small spines and hairs that kind of are different parts of the wings to add more rigidity or less rigidity. There's this thing called the terra stigma, which is this small little dot of color tip for the wing, which we think xt to kind of stabilize the main cord of the
wing against vibrations during flight. It's kind of like a little counter leaper, like a little weight at the tip of the wing.
So that's what those dragonfly dots are for. And doctor Ware says that they have two sets of wings, one in front on the back of the fore wing and once the hindwing, and how wind passes over the fore wing depending on its angle effects also obviously how the air moves over the hindwing, which gives them such control and that allows them to glide, to fly backwards, and to attain hunting speeds up to thirty five miles per
hour or fifty five kilometers an hour. You were so lucky, you're too big for them.
So that all of that has been optimized by natural selection really to kind of move air in a certain way to kind of maintain lifts and decrease drag and energy expenditure.
Patrons, Susan Singley, Chris liss Ashton, Lexi Cable, Patricia Evans Page, Floor Boerwinkle, Lina Carpenter, and Jenny Vievbertron had evolutionary inquiries. People are talking about movies where the dinosaurs hanging out with like dragon sized dragonflies. True.
False.
Well, I mean everyone wants to talk about dinosaurs being around for a long time, but they're like a blit compared to dragon vies and Namavis souse, dragon baz dammeoplis are very old. Right, So these griffin flies were flying in the carboniferous, so three hundred and fifty million years ago, so this is before t rex and all these things that you see with dragonflies flying on. There certainly were dragonflies for as long as there were dinosaurs, there were dragonflies,
with a couple of exceptions. For modern dragonflies, if we date them to be around two hundred and twenty five, two hundred and thirty million years old, there were some small little we dinosaur proto dinosaurs that were kind of coming up them. But in general, like the carboniferous flying griffin flies would have been around, and they're like each wing was about thirty seven centimeters, so maybe seventy centimeters about two feet wide, you know, so they're there, I
would I don't. I mean, that probably would look like a dragon when it was in the and that's pretty big, but it's not the size of a Komodo dragon, certainly not. But they were definitely around. As you see that kind of rise of reptiles, right, the age of reptiles, as that was kind of starting to happen, they would have already been these odinates or proto odinates in the sky.
What sound, what sound do you think that would make?
Yeah, I mean, so the sound of dragonfly wings is so interesting, right, And there actually are these kind of like spines and ridges on the what they call the leading edge of the wing that some people have said for Pentalatha vessence, this wandering glider. Actually some of those ridges and spines are to decrease the amount of sound that they make, so that way they can avoid being heard by predators and sneak up on their prey more easily.
But dragonfly wings aren't like if you I used to have one on my desk actually, but you can if you ruffle them. They definitely make a noise, most definitely, But I think they would be selected to try and make as little sound as possible, right if they're going about their business.
A few patrons, including Cole, the Evans, Karra Young, Devin, and Curtis to a Kahashi who wanted to know, in Curtis's words, where on the food chain are they? Who eats them?
Do bats eat them?
Birds eat them? Apparently they're delicious, right, it couldn't be delicious.
Bats eat them, birds eat them, lizards eat them, frogs eat them, fish eat them, mammals eat them. There's a lot we eat them. Humans eat them, like not just me, but like many many cultures of people that eat insects eat dragonflies. So yeah, I think they're really like a very common good source of protein.
This is a very informed question from rich Thomas Simpson said, if we puny humans have three options in our eyes RGB, do we have any idea what the dragonflies have that a whopping thirty different visual options. Use them for seems like overkill Aside from seeing a wider spectrum, what more are they getting? Are they seeing sounds? Can they see the future? Can they see who've used their tiktoks? What's
going on? Okay, So just a quick side note. An option is a protein that binds to light reactive receptors, which underlie vission. Humans have three cone type cells that help us see color, and rod cells help us detect light. And for more on this and a lot of detail, we have a whole ophthalmology episode. That's great, it's all about eyes. But yeah, back to dragonflies. Do they have ten times the opsins that we do?
So they have a lot of options, and there's been a lot of expansions in kind of like whole families of a whole different kinds of options. Yeah, I don't know that it's overkilled because there is a lot of color and they're using my guy, they're using this to communicate, right, so males are communicating with males and males are communicating
with females. They're doing it for species recognition. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why selection would have maybe acted on this, and we do see site variation in the opsins, for example, and the things that fly at night brits of the things that are diurnal. So I think that if you look across the amount of color that you see and ordinates, it's huge. And the families that have the most range of color are also the families that are the most species rich. And Rea Foods
Seth Bibe. There's a few labs that have worked especially like in a lot of detail on the options, and I think what the conclusion is is that colors like a really important part of the story of the evolution of odinates, and so we of course we might expect that their options are part of that story too.
What about their brains of a few people want to know, Yes, like Flora Boerwinkled, Dave canon tany magic fingers wanted to know what's their brain situation?
Like in Flora's words, Well.
I mean they I guess they can do a lot with what they have. So let's say mentioned they're able to do interception style predation, which is pretty remarkable. You know, that's what lions do, and they're able to do that with a relatively small number of descending into neurons.
So this is when a predator tracks its prey and guesses where it's going to go next, and then heads that way to intercept it and catch it. So they're doing some insect physics and math up there.
But they have like optic lobes. They have a mushroom body, which is where we think there's a lot of memory where the memory storage happens in odinates. But like all insects, they basically have kind of it's more like clusters of ganglia, you know, that we're working with. We're not talking about a centralized brain per se. I mean they do have a tintorum, they do have in their head. They do have these big major lobes, and they do have this mushroom body and nerves that descend from the head. But
I wouldn't think of it like a mammal brain. Just think of it more like near these clusters of ganglia that work together for sensory input.
So them's got brains, they got small once they got brains.
Though.
Patron Kili Shabaz submitted an audio question via Patreon.
Hi Elie Kili Chabz, this may be my favorite ology ever. Wondering why there are so many color morphs of different species makes it really hard to pick out the right one on a naturalist.
Thanks, Do you have any tips for people who are out dragonfly spotting and how to identify different dragon flies.
That's a tough fun for sure, so we do. I mean, there are a lot of good field guides out there, so give like props to Nothing beats a book, you know, having a book in your hand, because they could do kind of break down the color plus wing venation or head or other features that you should look for, because sometimes color can be misleading. Like I mentioned, the eastern pond hawk is green, except for when it's not. When
it's a male that's old, it's blue. You know. There are also some damsel flies where there's males that are a certain color, there's females that are a certain color, and then there's females that kind of change their color to look like males to avoid sexual harassment.
Literally, like in drag we're like traveling solo wearing a full glue on beard. Just leave me alone. And you know what else is fun? The paper faking death to avoid male coercion Extreme sexual conflict resolution in a dragonfly, which describes the Moorland hawker dragonfly who deposits her eggs, flies away and if trailed by a male, she crashes dramatic into vegetation. She lies motionless upside down for as long as it takes, and then when the coast is clear,
she gets on her merry way. She's like later sucker.
So those can make it very complicated, so for damsel flies. For that reason, for those of us like myself who are more settying dragonflies, I often think, oh geez, it's just a lot of small blue things for damsel flies, because that's a lot of what they are, like a lot of small blue things that are kind of hard
to tell apart. Often what you want to look for for damsel flies, for species or even sometimes the genera is you want to look at the anal what they call the anal appendages of these class birds that males use, and you need to use have a hand lens or like a jeweler's loop that you can look at them, and the shape of them are very distinctive, right, so those can be diagnostic. But sometimes I would say it's very hard to take a picture of that for I naturalists,
you know what I mean. And so if you're using aig naturalists only, you would miss those characters, and those characters will probably really help you get to the species id or so I would say, if you can get like a small magnu find glass or something to take with you when you're looking at it, and look at the bum, look at the tail end, you know, look at the tip of the abdomen. That will allow you to kind of look at the overall shape. Sometimes they're
not sometimes they're hooked. Sometimes there's a little tooth on the anal appendages, and those things are really important diagnostic characters.
So damsel flies, you got to really get up in there. Dragonflies is a little more casual for dragonflies.
Often you can look at the wing venation and you don't need to do anything fancy, you know, just hold the dragonfly in your hand and look at the eye, hold them by the wings, and then just look at the wing venation. And all skimmers have a shape that looks like a foot in their wings, so the wing venation actually informs the shape of like a little knee, a shin, a toe, a heel, you know, and then
a calf. So you kind of get used to the patterns of things so that when in doubt with the color, that can kind of be your backup.
Nice.
So get into that venation, ve nations where it's at.
Don't get a tattoo with the wrong venation.
Yeah, last question from listeners, and I'm glad they asked this because same same Chelsea Awick. A lot of people, by the way, just said they're very stoked about this. Emmy the Stranger said, dragonflies or fairies prove me wrong. Alley Edith wanted to know they see magic? Are they magic? Emily Staffer said, when I was little, I was told it's good luck when lands on you. That's definitely true, right. Some people asked Amanda loves Kurt and Chelsea Wilke also
asked about people passing away. Amanda says, I've often heard it said that dragonflizer science from loved ones who have passed on. Where did the symbolism come from? And I thought this is a great question from Kate. First time question asker said, is there any lure around them that might be linked to some behavior or a historic event?
It feels like they have symbolic meaning across cultures. They do seem a little magical, and Kate is a first time question asker and a biology student in Miami University's Project Dragonfly Program.
Odentatologists, I can't wait to see you at the next dragon Pie Society or World Dragonfly meeting. Well, this is what I would say is that for as long as there, I mean, humans were a very short footnote in the story of dragonflies, right, So we've never had been in a world where there wasn't dragonflies, right, So humans as such have evolved with dragonflies always present. So depending on which part of the world you're in, there's a lot
of cultural significance for dragonflies. Sometimes there's negative connotations, sometimes positive, and it really varies with kind of culture. My grandmother is British, she's from Yorkshire, so she taught me that if you fall asleep next to the water Darner's those asianids, that they would sew your lip shut.
Right.
That does not happen. They do not do that. But it's because people saw the overpositor and they thought it was like a darning needle, right, So that I would count that as a negative association, right. But then I have heard from lots of people that they feel like they're you know, a good sign that it's a sign of a loved one who's passed away. I have heard that before, and.
For a deep dive you could always see the delightful study insect myths an interdisciplinary approach fostering active learning in the journal American Entomologist, which cites the Zuni tribe of what is now New Mexico as the origin of the folklore that dragonflies are a messenger between God and humans. But the DNA people often called or once called the Navajo, had associations with dragonflies, signifying balance in life. Like most things, especially bugs, their value depends on who you ask.
Really, in some cultures they're considered to be very good luck. In other cultures, there's a story in East Asia where if they get caught in your hair that it's a sign that mental illness is coming. That would be like
an example of a negative one. But then there's examples from like ancient Japanese texts of an emperor that was bit by a horse fly, and a dragonfly came and ate the horse fly, because they do eat horseflies, and so one of the names for the islands of Japan was island of dragonflies, and some of the Samurai armature actually had on their helmets had dragonflies on them and had dragonflies kind of etched in some of the armor
that they wore. Because they were considered incredible predators and really good successful hunters, right, that would be a positive connotation. So I feel like it really varies probably through space and time. Right, what people have thought about dragonflies. I like to think that they're good luck. I mean, at the very least, there can be good harbingers of what's
happening in the environment. Right. So, like there's a red one that comes around in North America and like the autumn, and it's called simpetrum petra because it perches off and on rocks and things like that. And if you see that, you know autumn is coming. Right, There's Annextudius is one of the first ones to fly. If you see it, you know spring is here.
Ah.
So you can kind of use those as good markers. So you didn't know you weren't able to tell the seasons any other way. You could use dragonflies for sure. Plus you know that there's fresh water nearby. If you see dragonflies and damselflies, probably there's water pretty close by and it might very well be clean. With the astis that there are some dragonflies and damselflieser are not very
picky and they'll be in swill. But there's a lot that really like fresh water that is clean and that could be a good sign too.
And do dragonflies bite? You mentioned horsefly biting? Do dragonflies?
Do they bite people?
Patrons? Chuck, Miriam Han the Bee, heather Crane, Flora and the Fawn and Amanda loves Kurt needed to know this, and the ren you know had the statement, I just came here to say that dragonfly naiads plague my nightmares. And when I was a kid, I saw one eating a pollywog, so no offense, but what the fuck? Hashtag ugly baby mish. The fish also told the tale that when I was like ten at summer camp, this dragonfly made its way over to us and one of the
kids flipped out. She was so scared, which only made the dragonfly more attracted to our Why why are people afraid of them? And Sophie asked, am I right to be afraid of them? I feel like they bite, but I think I'm wrong they don't.
I mean if you pick up a drag. If I picked up a dragonfly and held it close to me, then it will use its mouth parts and try and like be like what's going on? And sometimes it feels like a but it's not because it's trying to bite me because it can't eat me, and it won't try and eat me. Its mouth parts kind of fit together and then the mandibles are on the inside and it would be very ineffective to try and eat me. You
don't want this. But sometimes they'll do that just to try and get away, right, And so some people will say, oh, I've mispit by a dragonfly, and I say, what were you doing? So well I picked it up. I'm like, well, then there you go. It's just trying to get away, right. So I don't think that counts. I mean, they don't come to you like, oh, I want to try and bite that human. They would never do that. It would be only if you happened to pick it up and
you were holding it and it was getting perturbed. Then they'll try and like.
Ah, like let me go. And I said, I would get to this.
But how are we doing? How are they doing? Matt Takata wants to know how can we protect them? Bonnie Rutherford want to know if mosquito dunks harm dragonfly and damselfly larvae in essentially like how are they doing?
So like all insects, we think that they're probably facing into insects decline, right, and the insect decline that we're seeing is like higher rate than we've ever seen in the history that humans have been keeping records. So we should be if you like wondering, how concerned should you be? I would say gravely, incredibly intensely concerned.
Right.
What we don't know is whether or not the pattern is the same in the Arctic, or in the temperate regions, or in the traffic unions for dragonflies and amplifies. There was some early reports that maybe because we actually had done an okay job putting regulations for fresh water in some parts of the world, that maybe they actually were doing better now than they were in the seventies, for example.
But whether or not that means they're doing as well as they were in nineteen hundred or pre industrial revolution, probably not. What we know is that populations are changing in terms of their geographic distribution. Things that used to only be found, For example, annex and Parada was found in southern Europe northern Africa, and now it's established in Sweden, so they're expanding their ranges. What that means for the Texa in the Arctic, whether they're going to be out competed,
we don't know. Know that they need fresh water, right, So as you lose fresh water, that's a risk of course for dragonflies and nempliphus because they cannot breed in salt water. They need fresh water. And as we pollute, you know, we continue to pollute and change in divert water. That's a big part of what humans do. We're very we're we seem to not realize that we have very very little fresh water on this earth, and all life depends on it, Like every single living thing depends on
fresh water, and we have almost none of it. Almost none of it's fresh, Almost all of it is salt. Right, So we really need this precious like resource, and the dragonflies and damsifies really need this precious resource. But we treat it like it's renewable, like there's an unlimited amount, and there really is not. So that's something to say, Yeah,
you should probably be very worried. We and they need our help, just like all insects need our health, but freshwater insects in particular, because without fresh water, they're not able to breathe, right, that's it. Population over as you know people would say, so building freshwater sources can be important. You know, having a water feature in your yard can
be important. And I don't mean like a tub that breeds a bunch of mosquitoes that only one or two dragonflies can be in, because that's not really what we're looking for, but like an actual like a pond, like people can build like water features of little ponds in their yard that can be really helpful. Voting for people who care about fresh water, whether even your town council. I mean often people think that it's a national issue and not a local issue. It's absolutely a local issue.
You probably have fresh water within a few blocks of where you live, whether you live in an urban sitting or in a real setting, and so voting for people who are going to protect that fresh water is really important. That has a really big impact. And I think that in general, just getting people to realize that freshwater insects are important food for everything, right, for birds, for fish, for frogs. We kind of really need them more than I think people realize.
What's the hardest thing about being a dragonfly expert.
That's a good question. I don't think there's much that's hard about it. It's kind of a blessed life. And if anybody complains about this job, I promise you probably they go to bed with a smile on their face and they're just doing it performatively because academics feel like they have to complain. There's not a lot of bad things being an idonatologist, you know. I mean, you get to be outside, it's a hot day, you're near fresh water,
which means you're guaranteed to go for a swim. The dragonfly community has this thing where we often go for ininget ice cream after you do collecting. It's like a thing that dragon white people do, so it's usually almost always ice cream. There's a lot of cool questions that are not yet to be answered. The live room for discovery, the collaboration between people, whether you're from Nigeria or Guyana,
or Japan or or Northern Canada. Like, there's room for collaboration with everybody, and people I think are really good team builders in this business. Compared to other insect groups that I've worked on where it was very competitive, dragonflies, it does not seem like that. So if so when I told me this was a tough job, I would probably be like, really cut less, real talk, be honest with me, and then they, i'm sure would be like, yeah, you're right, this is a pretty good job.
Do you have a favorite aspect of it? Do you love like field work like early morning field work days, or do you love like getting back and getting data crunch, Like is there a heart that you love the most?
I think, I mean, I really do like it all. I really love doing field work. I love being out at freshwater. I mean that was kind of what got me interested in it any ways, was just being near the lake all the time, seeing dragonflies land And that
part is still just like what field work is. But sometimes it's very cold, like do we did the We were in the Arctic last October drilling, you know, cutting holes in the ice at minus you know, thirty degrees or something like that, And there were times when it didn't feel as fun, but it was still fun, you know what I mean, Like even like the base level of like, oh, I'm not sure, it's still like stratospheres above any job I've ever had in terms of enjoyment,
But even like aligning DNA is fun looking at their genitals under the microscope was fun. Making the phylogeny is fun. Working with collaborators, you know, is fun. So I think the whole, the whole shebang, it's a pretty great job. I feel so lucky that I get to do it.
Thank you so much for talking to me about dragonflies, which are so long. I'm so excited to.
Talk to you. Thanks for inviting me.
So ask some daring questions to delightful dragonfly experts, because look at all we learned. And for more on doctor Jessica where please see her socials in the show notes and follow her. Tell her this She's awesome. And next time you see a dragonfly, tell hey, I know about you. I know about your butt and your eyes.
I like you.
Thank you for listening. We're at Ologies on Instagram and x I'm at ali Ward on both. We have swear free episodes called Smologies available for free. Just look for Smologies at the link in the show notes or wherever you get podcasts and subscribe. Spread the word Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminting the Ologies podcast Facebook group, and thank you Aveline Malik for making our professional transcripts. Thanks to
Kelly Dwyer for making the website. Noel Dilworth is our lovely scheduling producer and worked for years to schedule lists. Susan Hale is a great friend and managing director of Ologies. Chafey is an editor, always a very cheery help and lead editor with astounding maneuverability. Herself is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you secret today. It's that it's five nine pm
on November fifth. That's right, I record these leg at the last minute. And it's election night in America. I'm in pajamas, I have not showered, I do not smell good. And tomorrow's my frigging birthday, and so tonight a few friends are coming by to watch the election results and have pizza. I'm not doing great. Tuesdays are already a sprint to the finish. Birthdays are weird because everyone's nice to you and you're like.
Ah, it's too much.
And election days are just white knuckle shit shows. And my intestines people are oppressol. My hands are like a virgin on a homecoming date. I'm just sending this out saying, hey man, let's spend time and space with our minds and let's hope for the best.
America.
I believe in you get it together, do better from here on out on a lot of things. So love y'all. Okay, off to shower, Bye.
Bye, pacadermatology, homology or doo zoology, lithology, zeronology, meteorology, pedatology, ethnology, seriology, elinology.
It's almost like you're the dragonfly.