Beautiful dragonflies prove to be deadly for mosquitoes
Bet you haven’t paid much attention to dragonflies. I didn’t either, until I learned about their voracious appetite for mosquitoes.
Wow, mosquito eaters! I began watching the pencil-thin critters zipping through the air on filigree wings in dizzying twists and turns, but I couldn’t get a good look until they perched on plant stems.
Then I saw their florid bodies and intricate gauzy wings, as though knitted from spider webs. One was called an eastern pondhawk, with a powdery blue body, emerald face and translucent wings finely laced with threadlike black lines.
A gorgeous critter but no less an insect, with a 2-inch-long body — consisting of a head with face and eyes, a thorax holding six legs and a pair of wings on each side, and a segmented abdomen that looks like a tail.
A dragonfly begins life under shallow water as a larva, called a nymph, which hatches from a tiny egg beneath the leaf of an aquatic plant. The nymph looks like a miniature water monster and grows ever larger through successive molts until it creeps up a plant stem into dry air, shoves out of a final larval skin and emerges as a dragonfly.
As a water monster, the critter gobbles up mosquito larvae that also live in shallow water.
As a pretty dragonfly, it chomps on flying mosquitoes in midair.
But for dragonflies to multiply as mosquito exterminators, they need nonpolluted ponds, creeks and bayous where their lives develop from larvae living in the shallows.
Houston’s bayous that have naturally occurring aquatic plants offer good habitat for dragonflies. Hats off to the Bayou Land Conservancy and Buffalo Bayou Partnership for keeping bayous in their natural state.
Aquatic plants, like lily pads, give dragonflies places to lay eggs, and plants, like pickerelweed, provide perches from which they can launch sorties to waylay mosquitoes.
Dragonflies are relatively common along Buffalo Bayou, Greens Bayou and other bayous, as well as ponds at city and county parks, golf course ponds and neighborhood ponds without bulkheads.
Get acquainted with the mosquito eaters.
The blue dasher, for instance, has a brownish thorax with dark stripes and a bright-blue abdomen, white face and blue or green eyes. The widow skimmer has conspicuously bicolored wings, dark brown on the inner half and chalky white on the outer half.
Males are colorful, females drab. In the mating process, a male seizes the female in flight as both curl the tips of their abdomens together in a heart-shaped oval. What a metaphor.