Dragonflies are so cool.
Recently a gold-colored dragonfly seems to have made our backyard its territory. While I don’t know its gender, I’ll refer to it as ‘him’ just because he seems larger and territorial, and male dragonflies are more likely to be those things. Because of his gold color and quick erratic flight patterns, we of course named him ‘Snitch’, as in ‘Golden Snitch’. He has been circling and patrolling now for a week or so. He is most welcome in our backyard - I hope he destroys the mosquito population there. With his flying prowess, catching slow stupid mosquitoes should be easy for him.
He is fun to watch, and one day we tried to capture his flight with a not-state-of-the-art iPhone camera. This home-made collage shows some of the slow-motion footage we captured:
The video quality could be better, as the phone is old and he is hard to film. But I still found it interesting to watch his behavior in slow motion. When watching him in real time, it seems like his wings are constantly flapping and he flies in purposeful, graceful lines. But in the video you can see that he glides for stretches, and that his wingbeats are irregular and often look like emergency corrections for when he starts listing to one side or the other during flight.
The video The Insane Biology of: The Dragonfly is worth a watch, it contains much better videography. I really want one of the dragonfly-inspired drones they show at the end. Dune ornithopters, anyone?
Cool things I learned about dragonflies thanks to Snitch:
- They have been around for 350 million years, and their fossils from back then are still recognizable as dragonflies. Though at times in their history they were much larger than they are now. Scary large.
- They can control each of their four wings independently. Looking closely at the video, Snitch can certainly control each pair of his wings independently of the other pair. And it looks like each wing in a pair can assume different angles relative to his body, i.e., the two wings in a pair aren’t always positioned symmetrically. But I did not see any one wing flapping completely independently of the other three.
- Snitch is a member of the class of dragonflies that are called ‘flyers’, he is not a ‘percher’. He is constantly flying around, we’ve never once seen him land on anything.
- Dragonflies are the most successful hunters known, they catch their prey 95% of the time. Their flying skill is combined with a nearly-360 degree visual system and a brain capable of extrapolating a flying insect’s path and intercepting it mid-air. If I wanted to design a perfect mosquito killing machine, I certainly couldn’t do any better than the dragonfly.
- Dragonfly aquatic larvae are among the creepiest creatures I have ever seen. Stuff of nightmares.
Sadly, I also learned that dragonflies only live a month or two. So carpe culex, Snitch!
