Often described as the perfect predator, the dragonfly begins life in a beautiful, yet vulnerable way. Rosemary Conroy tells you what she's seen at her local pond.
Welcome to this week's edition of Something Wild. I'm Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
This is the time of year when small miracles occur in nature. If you are near a pond or lake on a sunny morning, you may be able to witness what I think is one of the most remarkable phenomena in nature: metamorphosis. Specifically, the transformation of a drab, mud-poking insect into an aerial dynamo, with wings that sparkle in the sun: the dragonfly.
My enchantment with this species began one June day when I witnessed several dragonfly larvae, also called nymphs or nyads, emerge from a local pond. These inch and a half-long bugs represent the juvenile stage of a dragonfly. Hatched from eggs laid in the water the previous summer, these rather fierce-looking creatures were poised to enter the next stage of their relatively short, but fascinating, lives.
Right before my eyes, the nyad literally split open its head, and like Athena springing full-grown from the head of Zeus, a dragonfly emerged. Then, ever so slowly, it unfurled its wings, and thus transformed, rested in the sun.
I watched this absorbing drama repeat itself over and over - and I wasn't the only one. Colonies of hungry ants repeatedly carried off newly-emerged dragonflies before they could fly away. I know, I know, don't intervene - but... well, I split the difference and rescued about half the dragonflies. I was just so entranced by those kaleidoscope eyes with their 360 degree vision, and those windowpane wings that would soon transport them 35 miles per hour.
300 million years of evolution have helped dragonflies to artfully combine beauty and function. Known as the perfect predator, these winged acrobats consume hundreds of gnats, mosquitoes and flies each day. More poetically, Alfred Lord Tennyson once described them as a "living flash of light." So it seems appropriate then, at the summer solstice, to wish you all "dragonflies."
For Something Wild, I'm Rosemary Conroy.
