Odonatology (DRAGONFLIES) with Jessica Ware

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Allie Ward.

This is Olagies.

This is Dragonflies.

You did not know you needed an episode on that, but here we are.

Okay, this is, oh, 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, Odonata sounds a little bit too much like odontology, which is the study of teeth.

And I always got that confused, but there's a reason.

Odonata 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.com slash ologies for as little as a dollar a month thank you to everyone in ologies shirts and hats and totes from ologies merch.com we have shorter kid-friendly classroom safe smaller gies episodes available wherever you get podcasts or the link in the show notes also thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for this 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 25 who wrote, in an age of brain rot and doom scrolling, ologies is a pinnacle of hope and brain growth.

I should be sleeping 25.

Thank you for staying awake long enough to write that.

So let's get right into this episode, which I'm putting out on the night of the U.S.

election.

I'm literally recording this as ballots are coming in.

Tomorrow is the 6th.

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 are cooler than dinosaurs.

With scholar, dragonfly expert, and thus odonatologist Dr.

Jessica Ware.

My name is Jessica Ware, and I use she/her pronouns.

And you're in New York, right?

Yes.

Yes.

And what is it like working with the museum?

Is that bonkers?

It's awesome.

I love it.

I worked at Records for 10 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 Xanadu, it's like the best.

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 Natural natural history museum.

My mom 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 Dr.

Ware's first visit to New York's iconic American Museum of Natural History was, she was a wee one.

It was about 25 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 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 for field 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, like, you know, 68, 69 degrees latitude.

And then we do a lot of stuff in the tropics.

And

they're both amazing, like, insect funic, 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 upon dozens in the Arctic.

There's six that are kind of whole Arctic, that have a circumpolar distribution, but there's over 40 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 Antarctica.

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 position really I don't know why it matters.

We could be floating any which way you know what I mean.

I've collected dragonflies in Namibia, which is a very dry, kind of desert-y environment.

But like you can find them in deserts, you can find them in mountainous regions, temperate, tropical, 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 Odonetta, the pre-dragonflies and damselflies, they're a group we call griffinflies commonly.

They're in this family Meganeridae.

They flew during the Carboniferous period, so like 350 million years ago.

And those were big.

Each wing was like 37 centimeters.

So it's like that's a pretty big size individual.

So each wing was almost 15 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 odonates.

So they're not modern dragonflies.

Modern dragonflies and damselflies are younger, I think, you know, 250, 225 million years old or so.

So a full 100 million years later.

And depending on what you're measuring for size, right, there's either Megaloprapis, which is a damselfly that weighs almost nothing, but it has a pretty big wingspan and a very long, very, very thin, thread-like 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 But then in terms of mass, probably it would be pedullaridae, which are a different family in Anisoper, the dragonflies.

And some of the pedellaridae that live in Australia, pedullara is one.

Pedallara gigantia.

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 Megaloprapis, but it weighs quite a bit.

So depending on if you're going for like size in terms of length and 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 griffonflies to dragonflies?

And also who's naming them?

Because named after griffins 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.

They're not sure.

So, there's like a lot of common names for each of the families.

Darners are the name, the common name for Aishnity, and they have an ovipositor 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 looked like a sewing needle because they lay their eggs in plant material.

So, they're called darners.

But a lot of the damselflies are related to their color.

I mean, they're all very colorful, but there's jewel wings and bluets for some of the damselfly names.

And the common names vary in general sort of country by 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 odonatology in general really tight community really good vibes only um but you tend to focus on one or the other although there are some exceptions but my specialty are dragonflies.

And my colleague, Seth Bybee, he really focuses on the damselflies.

I think there's a lot.

I mean, there's 3,000 of each of those groups, right?

The 3,000 damselflies, 3,000 dragonflies-ish.

And they do slightly different things.

They all have freshwater nymphs, but the damselflies have gills that are external, and the dragonflies have internal gills.

The dragonflies are kind of stocky-bodied, and some of them have lost their ovipositor, so they lay their eggs on the surface of water.

None of the damselflies do that.

They all lay their eggs in 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 3,000 each.

And both their bibbis 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 damselfly is 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 Megaloprapus on that really big damselfly I mean there's a lot of interesting things in damselflies 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 a 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 us just use the word dragonfly.

They mean both.

But in general, if you said dragonflies, people think that you mean olive Odonata.

And yeah, so I think they would just think it was normal.

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 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, endophytic oviposition that's called, or on the surface of the water or the mud, exophytic ovaposition, that's called.

Damselflies, endophytic in plants, dragonflies, exophytic, not in plants.

And in either case, the egg hatches when it develops in freshwater.

There's like a couple of examples of things that we think are 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 pedillarity that I talked about, they actually have burrows.

And there's somatochlora and emerald in North America that utilize as crayfish burrows.

But like in general, the eggs kind of settle somewhere in the water column or down at the bottom on the substrate.

The nymphs hatch, and if they're juvenile damselflies then they have these external gills that they use to breathe with and if they're dragonflies then they have these internal gills, these rectal pads that they use 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, so mosquito larvae, dobs and fly larvae, mayfly larvae, cataphy larvae, 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 flavescens 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 pools 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 in those juveniles are actually frozen in the winter time and they freeze and thaw freeze and thaw and even in the temperate systems like in northern ontario like where my nana lives the lake freezes solids solids, right?

So the nymphs are either burrowing down into the substrate or, 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 boathouse or a dock or like whatever thing that they can cling to.

And then the adult is kind of pulls itself out of this larval skin, which are called exuvia.

I think in Europe they call them imagines, but anyways, those are those are kind of left behind.

So often you can find exuvia or imagines kind of in the veg around fresh water.

These exuvia, 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 dragonfly nymphs.

And they look a little bit like cicada malts, if you've ever seen one of those.

And these little insect husks get their name exuvia 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.

And then the adult has to take some time.

Its 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 hemolymph out and they kind of stretch their wings out.

They slowly dry and we call harden up when they're first emerged to 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

adults.

And they just do things that adults do, which is mating, 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.

They do.

Depending on the taxon, 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 where 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 dusk 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 damselflies are territorial.

And so they do these mating kind of dances or these flight competitions.

And you need to have a lot of fat stores for that.

Often what dragonflies will do is they'll, and damselflies is that they'll just fly until they use up their fat stores and then they just kind of drop into the water.

And they did.

So it was like in their best interest, 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 at sea 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 10 years years or something, but how long does a 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 a decade, maybe two decades, who knows, right?

That's bonkers.

But I think like five years would be like an old-ish, and there's a couple of extreme outliers, but often they're one or two years, you know, three or four years.

That's just the nymph stage, either from six weeks to a decade 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's that's their whole thing.

They're just 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 pantellophavescence, it's six weeks development time, and then it lives for a couple of months.

So that's one where it's reversed.

But in the majority of cases, then the juvenile is a longer stage than the adult for a lot of dragonflies and damsiflies.

I feel like I know people with dragonfly tattoos.

I know people who see dragonflies as do you?

I have one.

Gorgeous.

How long have you had it?

Maybe 10 years or something like that.

I've had it for a while.

So Dr.

Ware pushed up her long-sleeve 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 dragonfly.

Actually, I have a damselfly.

I don't have a dragonfly.

I was wrong, a damselfly tattoo.

This was surprising.

This is an ebony jewel wing, Calopteryx 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 if like the venation is very important, it's correlated with like flight behavior.

So if they did the veins wrong on the tattoo, I would know that it was wrong and that it couldn't fly right.

So I was like a little bit anxious about having a tattoo that I was going to dislike afterwards if the venation wasn't right.

So Colopteryx maculata means beautiful wing.

And this ebony jewel-winged damselfly has a slender, metallic, blue-green body, looks like a sports car paint job, and wings that look almost opaque, like a velvety black with subtly visible venation.

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 antennae, and dragonflies and damselflies have very, very, very small, almost like not visible antennae.

They're very, very, very small.

So if you have something with long antennae, it's usually an ant lion or something like that.

So a lot of people, they're like, oh, I have this dragonfly tattoo, or and then they show it to me, and I'm like, oh, it's an ant lion, or it's like a dermoptera.

But of course, I don't say that because I'd be root.

So I'm just like, oh, that's very cool.

Because I think it's cool that they want to get an Adonada tattoo.

But if it has long antennae, I actually said that to my tattoo artist when he was doing this tattoo, the first sketch, I was like, oh, no, no, no, antennae, gotta go.

No, no, but they're like, but insects have antennae, and I'm like, no, dragonflies and damnifies, but you wouldn't see them.

They're almost like, no, we can't have them on there.

I'm not going to have a Neuroptera tattoo.

Come on.

No.

I mean, not that they're not cool too, but.

No, I love that that tattoo artist has probably thought about you every single time they've seen a dragonfly.

Yeah, he said he had just done a tattoo for his wife and he was like, oh, thank goodness I didn't put lung antennas on hers because she didn't want them.

And I was like, yeah, it's 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 my, we spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents and they lived on a lake, Lake Muskoka.

And so we saw a lot of dragonflies and damselflies for sure.

But I didn't, I didn't think I was going to 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 ubc i went to university of british 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 mesysticaster which is sister to that big one that i talked about megaloprapus it's a damselfly and it it lays its eggs in bromeliad plants 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 experts at foremost odonatologists.

And I switched into his lab and he said to me, what are you talking about?

There are so many unanswered questions for odonates, 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 odonatology.

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 the only requirement.

It's that you have to sort of like them.

And I think the whole community was so much better for that philosophy.

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 odonatologists studying?

What are you looking at now?

It's a lot.

I mean, it varies, right?

Mike wasn't wrong that 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 worked together with my postdoc, Lacey, 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 is 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 just really interested in particular types of behavior or nymph or larval behavior.

I guess it really varies.

Like you name it, somebody is 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 mask, which kind of like is this mouth part that kind of shoots outwards and grabs the prey and then brings it in towards their mandibles.

Well, that's terrifying.

Sebastian Busa and others 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 300 million years of evolution for this group.

Is there a group text for Odin?

I mean, kind of.

There's like an Odin at a listserv, I guess, and there's lots of dragonfly groups, but there's like a worldwide dragonfly association, the WDA, and 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 odonatology group that has a lot of people from West Africa, but really people globally.

There's this Sociedad Odinatologica 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 a charity or anything associated with Mike to 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 501c, and the mission and goal is to really promote the study of dragonflies and damselflies worldwide.

And so any donations that go to them help to, they have a journal that they publish, and then they also use it for funding for students to go to conferences.

This dragonfly meeting, which is so fun.

It's every two years.

So that might be a good one to

donate.

That's great.

Thank you.

So each episode we donate to a cause of theologist's choosing, and this week it's going to the World Dragonfly Association in honor of Dr.

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.

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Okay, let's dip in your questions, damsels, dragons, flies, patrons.

You two can submit questions, even audio questions, to get your voice on the show by contributing to patreon.com slash 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 there 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.

There are two of them.

And this second penis is called the vesica spermalis.

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 spermatheca and the bursa copulatrix.

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 transfer their ejaculate.

Just going to kind of move this out of the way, like if you went to a potluck and you threw away someone else's casserole 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 there's a lot of variation on a theme.

Like selection has acted.

So lots of different species have slightly different things.

Some look like a scoop, some look like ragged claws.

Like it really varies.

But if you don't have a microscope, a scanning electron microscope, and you're just holding a dragonfly, or if you're just up close looking at it, if it's perched somewhere, just look at the base of their abdomen near where it meets the thorax.

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 out 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 damselflies, there's variation in the wing color pattern between males and females.

So this tattoo that I have is Colopteryx 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, what they call a 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 hawk is bright green as a male and female, but over time, as the males get older, they secrete this wax over their body and then they end up looking completely blue.

It's like graying at the temple, sort of like silver fox almost.

Yeah, blue fox.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

What about colors in general?

And many of you, including Rowan Tree, Kyla C., Mouse Pakistan, Eating Dog Hair for a Living, Earl of Gramelkin, Rachel Pristako, Charlotte Parkinson, Jesse Meeks, Adam T.

Burns, Rachel Fallon, Ari Fox, Pop School Emperor, Flazitron, Brian Shenanigans, Hope Jay, Devin, Jay Shay, Jackie G, Nicole S, and Elta Sparks also asked about this, as well as Turner Pierce wanted to know: are they all colorful and iridescent?

Doesn't that coloring make them more appealing to predators?

Alyssa Hoff, Sidoni S., a bunch of different people wanted to know why are they so colorful.

Alyssa asked, are there colors for a specific reason, for mating, for predator 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, and not all, but in some of the fossils that we have, the compression fossil also has the same bumps and rugos.

So, then when the light bounces off of it, it looks like it's 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 is, is from these pigment granules.

And the pigment can vary, right?

Some have melanins, some have mummicrums, like there's various types types of pigment.

And so there are some things that fly at night, like the shadow dragons is the common name of this genus Neurocordulia 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 drabbish brown in color.

So those metallic greens and blues aren't pigment-based, but rather the shape and the texture of the chitin 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 we'll link in the show notes.

But other colors are pigment-based, kind of like the color of our hair and skin.

Then in terms of why they're colorful, A lot of the patterns that you see are for sexual signaling.

So male, like the patterns on their wings might be for signaling, males signaling to other males, males and females females communicating to each other.

But then there's also color patterns that relate to thermoregulation.

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 idea is maybe that the dark color allows them to absorb more heat and the bright color to kind of shut more heat.

There's some idea that maybe this waxy prunescence is to prevent desiccation.

It's an anti-aging technique.

There are others, Plathema lydia 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 percher and it often perches out in the sun.

And so that allows it to kind of shunt 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 Wispell did her thesis on this damselfly called Argia apicalis, which actually changes its color right after mating.

Males actually change their color to being in 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: thermoregulation, 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 whoopee?

Dragonfly sexy times.

A lot of people want to know what's going on there.

Key Lime Pie, Renee Mandre, Bjorn Fredberg, Rachel Guthrie, Mallory Skinner, Sophia A., Clover, and Alyssa 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 Froh 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-shaped wheel that you see of the males and females together, we call the copulatory wheel.

And that indeed is usually males and females doing mating like as broadly defined, right?

Often, what they're doing while they're flying around isn't necessarily the male ejaculating, right?

Because remember, males make the sperm in 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 this the sperm displacement, so the scraping, right?

Oh, 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 damselflies, 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.

In a lot of odonates, 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 females with damage to the back of her eyes because the omatidae are fragile and they can break with the tarsi and the tarsal claws kind of walking 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 a 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 abdomen 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 abdomen up because it's a sign that it's not the right species, right?

Those are kind of species-specific locking keys.

But like I said, not all odonates have a lock and key mechanism.

So when the female and the males enter this copulatory wheel, they can either stay perched 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 flight behavior, right?

Sometimes males and females, after the sperm is transferred, they let go of each other and the male will either be like, peace, I'm out, no contact guarding, or the males will do what's called non-contact guarding, where 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 sperm, right?

He wants to ensure interpretation.

That's called non-contact guarding, 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 is laying her eggs.

So they can piece them 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 tandem, where males will like let go of a female, grab her again, let go of a female, 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 could 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 pretty much right away.

Some dragonflies have their eggs ripen in batches.

This is work that Camilla Koch and Urin Silene 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 sperm, she can lay her eggs.

She just needs to find suitable habitat.

That's often why you see dragonflies mating at water because then they're right there and then the water's right there and they can lay their eggs.

What about her ovipositor?

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 Achinidae, the petalaridae, which are the petal tails, or the cordulagastridae, they have pretty honkin, they're called spike tails because their ovipositor is really long.

Imagine a skinny little fingernail at the tip of your beehind.

It's like, hello.

Those ones, and you definitely will see the ovipositor.

It looks like a small little blade, in some cases, serrated.

It's like a series of gonopophyses 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 libiluloidea and the gomphidae, the clubtails are the gonfidae, and the libululoidea are things like skimmers and emeralds.

And both of those groups have lost their ovipositor.

So you wouldn't see it.

You would just see, like if you flip them over, you would see what's called a vulvar lamina, kind of just like a little flap.

And they squirt out their eggs like in a clump from that little flap.

They don't even need an ovipositor.

They're like, it's fine.

No, no ovipositor because they're not using plant material.

So you really only need the ovipositor 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 while usually damselflies are more delicate looking, the largest of the odonates is a damselfly.

So the smallest is actually a dragonfly.

So that's a little flippy-floppy.

And skimmers are dragonflies, like the bright red ones you might see.

But skimmers are called chasers in some countries.

Now, darners, again, have that long ovipositor and are super fast flyers, but now you can just go get a bug book and start kind of gawking 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 Ferry, Mama B and Dad Aussie, Scott Hanley, and Amanda Loves Kurt.

Questions about pop culture.

Oh, yeah.

Someone asked, This is very specific.

Claire Ritchie said, Carrie Colby voice, a dragonfly?

A dragonfly.

If you eat the entire thing, I will give you $1,000.

I swear to you, right now.

I can't believe you're just an adopt.

I eat ass, you guys.

I can eat a bump.

RuPaul's drag race fans need to know, are dragonflies edible?

Apparently, have you heard anything about drag race and eating dragonflies?

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 muscle, 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 a high protein thing if that's the one like if it was me and I was wanting to eat something, I would break the wings off.

I would probably take the admin off because I don't need that.

And I would just eat 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 taste kind of nutty.

I actually don't eat shrimp because I'm allergic to shrimp.

So maybe that's what shrimp tastes like.

Maybe shrimp tastes like nuts.

I don't know.

Okay, so I looked into this for us.

And yes, you can 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 2024 study, Edible Dragonflies and Damselfflies, 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 warn that some of the same allergens in shellfish are present in other invertebrates 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 there's bacteria.

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 rawdog it for money straight down the gullet.

Now, I read one culinary message board that said they are, in fact, like a soft-shelled crab, pretty darn tasty.

And if you ask me, better for the planet than 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 Ferry, Bjorn Fredberg, Laurie 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 not 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 that was named after dragonfly.

And my mentions got all messed up because of all these dragonfly things.

And I was like, oh my gosh, everyone's talking about dragonflies.

No, they're kind of space.

Okay, so I looked this up.

According to NASA, Dragonfly is this quadcopter drone designed to explore the chemistry and the habitability of Saturn's moon, moon Titan.

And I'm thinking when they're building it, I hope they refer to it as a naiad, because how cute would that be like a little nymph?

Also, if it's like its Odonata namesake, then it would be powered by mosquito larvae and worms.

And if it's a baby, it could collect them by unhinging its hellmouth jaw, which dragonfly naiads do.

They toss it out like a javelin while it's still attached to their face.

And then some of them have pinchers that capture capture their fuel and then whewosh, bring it back to their mouth.

It's bonkers.

It's what Odonata nymphs can do.

And it is terrifying and inspiring.

Which brings it to a question about technology from patrons Ron, Sam, Jesse Prawford, Cleb, Jamie, and Thomas Payne, who wanted to know, are dragonflies 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 aircrafts 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 as 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 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 flyer.

And speaking of that, Gnome's Lormer, 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 turn so fast and I blink and then they're gone.

A bunch of you wanted to know this, and I will say your names very swiftly.

Cuddle Cuddle, Isabelle Leclerc, Rachel, G.J.

Wyatt, Olivia Kalas, Lauren Shingley, Philippe Jimenez, Nathan Marion, Kalina Anderson, Theta and Odysseus, Flora Boerwinkle, and Lori Pemberton, who asked, what's the top speed a dragonfly can reach?

Oliver Collis wanted 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 their wings?

But yeah, how, what's going on with the flying?

So, it really depends on the taxa.

So, some things fly very high up in the air column.

They fly very fast.

There's like reports of darners that can fly 30 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 flyers.

People tend to think of damselflies as being kind of poorer flyers than dragonflies.

Although there are things like that megaloprapis, that big giant helicopter damselfly, the one that lays its eggs in tree 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 modern 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 nothing in the sky except for odonate light things right but as the sky started to fill up with species and there was like birds and frogs and pterosaurs 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 in the in 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 wing veins are, the stiffer the wing is, and the sparser the wing veins are, the more bendy it is.

But there's also a bunch of this tissue called resolin, which is a really spongy tissue that makes it, 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 pterostigma, which is this small little dot of color at the tip of the wing, which we think acts to kind of stabilize the main cord of the wing against vibrations during flight.

It's kind of like a little counterleaver, like a little weight at the tip of the wing.

So, that's what those dragonfly dots are for.

And Dr.

Ware says that they have two sets of wings: one in front, one in back, the forewing, and one's the hind wing.

And how wind passes over the forewing, depending on its angle, affects also obviously how the air moves over the hind wing, which gives them such control.

And that allows them to glide, to fly backwards, and to attain hunting speeds up to 35 miles per hour or 55 kilometers an hour.

You were so lucky you're too big for them.

So all of that has been optimized by natural selection, really, to kind of move air in a certain way to kind of maintain lift and decrease drag and energy expenditure.

Patrons Susan Singley, Chrysalis Ashton, Lexi Cable, Patricia Evans, Paige, Flora Boerwinkle, Lena Carpenter, and Jenny Viv Bertrand had evolutionary inquiries.

People are talking about movies where 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 blip compared to dragonflies and damsifies, because dragonflies and demos flies are very old, right?

So these griffon flies were flying in the Carboniferous, so 350 million years ago.

So this is before T-Rex and all these things that you see with dragonflies flying around.

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 225, 230 million years old, there were some small little wee dinosaur protodinosaurs that were kind of coming up then.

But in general, like the Carboniferous flying griffin flies would have been around.

And they're like, each wing was about 37 centimeters, so maybe 70 centimeters, about two feet wide, you know, so they're, they're, I would, I don't, I mean, that probably looked like a dragon when it was in the sky.

I mean, 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 odonates or proto-odonates 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 Pentelothelves, this wandering glider, actually some of those ridges and spines are to decrease the amount of sound that they make so that that way they they can avoid being heard by predators and sneak up on their prey more easily.

But dragonfly wings are 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 Colby Evans, Carol Young, Devon, and Curtis Takahashi, 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 could 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 30 different visual opsins 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 views their TikToks?

What's going on?

Okay, so just a quick side note.

An opsin is a protein that binds to light-reactive receptors, which underlie vision.

Humans have three cone-type cells that help us see color, and rod cells help us detect light.

And for more on this in 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 10 times the options 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 whole different kinds of options.

Yeah, I don't know that it's overkill 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.

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 slight variation in opsins, for example, in the things that fly at night versus the things that are diurnal.

So, I think that if you look across the amount of color that you see in odonates, it's huge.

And the families that have the most range of color are also the families that are the most species-rich.

And Rio Fudahashi, Seth Bybe, there's a few labs that have worked especially in a lot of detail on opsins.

I think what the conclusion is is that color is like a really important part of the story of the evolution of Odin AIDS.

And so we, of course, we might expect that their options are part of that story too.

What about their brains?

A few people wanted to know.

Brains.

Yes.

Like Flora Boerwinkle, Dave Cannon, Tanya 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 I 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 interneurons.

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, a lot of where the memory storage happens in odonates.

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 tentorum, 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, you know, these clusters of ganglia that work together for sensory input.

So them's got brains.

They got small ones.

They got brains, though.

Patron Keely Chavez submitted an audio question via Patreon.

Hi, Ellie, Keely Chavez.

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 my natural list.

Thanks.

Do you have any tips for people who are out dragonfly spotting and how to identify different dragonflies?

That's a tough one 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 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, it's old, that's blue, you know.

There are also some damselflies 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, or 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 dramatically 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 damselflies, for that reason, for those of us like myself who are more studying dragonflies, I often think, oh, geez, it's just a lot of small blue things for damselflies, 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 damselflies for species or even sometimes the genera is you want to look at the anal, what they call the anal appendages, these claspers 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 that it's very hard to take a picture of that for iNaturalist.

You know what I mean?

And so if you're using iNaturalist only, you would miss those characters.

And those characters will probably really help you get to the species ID.

So I would say if you can get like a small magnifying 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 notch, sometimes they're hooked, sometimes they're a little tooth on the anal appendages, and those things are really important diagnostic characters.

So, damselflies, you gotta really get up in there.

Dragonflies, it's 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, I 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 forms a 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 venation's where it's at don't get a tattoo with the wrong venation

last question from listeners and i'm glad they asked this because same same chelsea wick a lot of people by the way just said they're very stoked about this.

Emmy the Stranger said, dragonflies are fairies.

Prove me wrong, Allie.

Edith wanted to know, they see magic.

Are they magic?

Emily Stoffer said, when I was little, I was told that's good luck when lands on you.

That's definitely true.

Right.

Some people asked, Amanda loves Kurt and Chelsea Wilk.

also asked about people passing away.

Amanda says, I've often heard it said that dragonflies are signs from loved ones who have passed on.

Where did the symbolism come from?

And I thought this was a great question from Kate, first-time question asker, said, is there any lore 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.

Ah, odometologists, I can't wait to see you at the next Dragonfly Society or World Dragonfly meeting.

Well, this is what I would say is that For as long as they're, I mean, humans were a very short footnote in the story of dragonflies, right?

So So we've never 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, darners, those Aishnids, that they would sew your lips shut, right?

That does not happen.

They do not do that.

But it's because people saw the ovipositor 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 can 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 Dine 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 like 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 horsefly, and a dragonfly came and ate the horsefly 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 about dragonflies.

I like to think that they're good luck.

I mean, at the very least, they 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 in like the autumn, and it's called Sympetrum.

Petra because it perches often on rocks and things like that.

And if you see that, you know autumn is coming, right?

There's Annex Studius is one of the first ones to fly.

If you see it, you know spring is here.

So you can kind of use those as good markers.

Say 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 asterisks that there are some dragonflies and damselflies that 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 horse fly 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 Wren 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 polywog, so no offense, but what the fuck?

Hashtag ugly baby.

Mish the fish also told the tale that when I was like 10 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 dragon, 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 pinch, 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 was bit 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 not biting you.

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 to this but how are we doing how are they doing matt taccata wants to know how can we protect them bonnie rutherford want to know if mosquito dunks harm dragonfly and damselfly larvae and essentially like how how are how are they doing

so like all insects we think that they're probably facing insect 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 be, I would say gravely, incredibly, intensely concerned, right?

Oh, dear.

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 tropic regions for dragonflies and damplifies.

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 70s, for example.

But whether or not that means they're doing as well as they were in 1900 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 Parata 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 taxa in the Arctic, whether they're going to be out-competed, we don't know.

We know that they need fresh water, right?

So as you lose fresh water, that's a risk, of course, for dragonflies and damn flies because they cannot breed in salt water.

They need fresh water.

And as we pollute, you know, we continue to pollute and change and divert water.

That's a big part of what humans do.

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 is fresh.

Almost all of it is salt, right?

So we really need this precious resource.

And 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 only to say yeah you should probably be very worried and we and they need our help just like all insects need our help but freshwater insects in particular because without fresh water they're not able to breed right that's it populations game over as you know people would say so Building freshwater sources can be important.

You know, having a water feature in your yard 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 or 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 setting or in a rural 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 odonatologist, 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 and get ice cream after you do collecting.

It's like a thing that dragonfly people do.

So it's usually almost always ice cream.

There's a lot of cool questions that are not yet to be answered.

There's a lot of room for discovery, the collaboration

between people, whether you're from Nigeria or Guyana or Japan or

Northern Canada.

Like there's room for collaboration with everybody.

And people, I think, are really good.

team builders in this in this business compared to other insect groups that I've worked on where it was very competitive.

Dragonflies does not seem like that.

So if someone told me this was a tough job, I would probably be like, really?

Let's real talk.

Be honest with me.

And then they, I'm sure, would be like, yeah, you're right.

This This is a pretty great 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 crunched?

Like, is there a part that you love the most?

I think I, 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 anyways, 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 we did the, we were in the Arctic last October drilling, you know, cutting holes in the ice at minus, you know, 30 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 stratosphere is 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 a pretty great job.

I feel so lucky that I get to do it.

Thank you so much for talking to me about dragonflies for 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 Dr.

Jessica Ware, please see her socials in the show notes and follow her.

Tell her that she's awesome.

And next time you see a dragonfly, tell her, hey.

I know about you.

I know about your butt and your eyes.

I like you.

Thank you for listening.

We're at Olagies on Instagram and X.

I'm at Allie 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.com.

Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Ologies Podcast Facebook group.

And thank you, Aveline Malik, for making our professional transcripts.

Thanks to Kelly Dwyer for making the website.

Noelle Dilworth is our lovely scheduling producer and worked for years to schedule us.

Susan Hale is a great friend and managing director of Ologies.

Jake Chafee 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 a secret, today it's that it's 5.09 p.m.

on November 5th.

That's right, I record these like 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 a pretzel my hands are like a virgin on a homecoming date.

I'm just sending this out saying, hey man, let's bend 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 you all.

Okay, off to shower.

Bye-bye.

Pachodermatology, homology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, old fabricology, mathology, seriology, celerology.

It's almost like you're the dragonfly.

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