Summer rains bring dragonfly days
It’s hot, but rains have recharged local ponds with fresh water, which engenders a burst of dragonflies to strafe summer’s horde of mosquitoes.
Dragonflies gobble up insects while darting over ponds, oxbows or creeks. With lightning speed, they make quick twists and turns on powerful gossamer wings. Their sleek bodies flash blues, reds and greens — a joyful sight on hot July days.
Old myths name the dragonfly “the devil’s darning needle” that could sew shut the lips of miscreant children as they slumbered in bed. But instead of being scared, children are drawn to
watch the frightful flying needles.
They see enchanting insects with a telltale tripart body: a head, thorax and long abdomen that looks like a tail of crayon colors. The critters fly on twin pairs of translucent wings attached to either side of the thorax and moving in tandem to propel fast aerial maneuvers.
Some children grow up to study dragonflies and learn of the crucial role they play in controlling pesky mosquitoes and bugs while noting that dragonflies depend on relatively quiet, unpolluted ponds and streams edged in vertically rising aquatic plants like cattails.
Male dragonflies, like eastern pondhawks with powder-blue bodies, perch atop plant stems to stake out aerial breeding territories. Woe to a male intruding on another’s territory because he’ll be attacked and maybe devoured by the territorial baron.
When the male spies a female gliding through his domain, he speeds off to clasp her behind the neck with the tip of his abdomen. It’s like a lock and key — the male’s abdomen tip is designed to clasp only the female of his species, while the female’s neck only fits the male of her species.
The female curls her abdomen so that the tip touches the base of the male’s abdomen to receive his sperm. Male and female bodies thereby curve into the shape of heart, prosaically known as a “wheel.”
After mating, the female flies low over the water while dipping her abdomen just below the surface in a kind of tap-dance motion as she deposits eggs in or under floating vegetation. The eggs hatch as underwater bugs called nymphs that grow larger in successive stages called instars.
The final instar climbs out of the water on an aquatic plant stem. Soon a dragonfly breaks out, dries its wings, and flies off to rid us of mosquitoes and inspire curiosity in children’s minds. Gary Clark is the author of “Book of Texas Birds,” with photography by Kathy Adams Clark (Texas A&M University Press). Email him at Texasbirder@comcast.net.