Speaker 1: Your flat out and your to do list is growing
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Speaker 1: the label or leaflet.
Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's the male that you haven't opened, sitting
Speaker 2: on your counter. Ali, Ward, this is ologies, this is dragonflies.
Speaker 2: You did not know you needed an episode on that,
Speaker 2: but here we are. Okay, this is h so good. Okay,
Speaker 2: So this guest is the only dragonfly expert I wanted
Speaker 2: for the job. I've waited years to chat with her.
Speaker 2: And she got her undergrad degree at the University of
Speaker 2: British Columbia Department of Zoology. She got a PhD at
Speaker 2: Rutgers in etymology and is currently a curator at the
Speaker 2: American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where
Speaker 2: she serves as chair of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology.
Speaker 2: Also a professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School. She
Speaker 2: has been the president of the Worldwide Dragonfly Association and
Speaker 2: the Entomological Society of America, Big Deals, and the co
Speaker 2: founder of Entomologists in Color. She knows dragonflies. We're here
Speaker 2: to talk about them.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: First off, oda nada sounds a little bit too much
Speaker 2: like odentology, which is the study of teeth, and I
Speaker 2: always got that confused. But there's a reason oda nada
Speaker 2: means toothed ones, and it's the study of these big
Speaker 2: winged beauties that cause a lot of feelings in us
Speaker 2: to be discussed. We will do that in a moment,
Speaker 2: but first, a huge thank you to patrons who support
Speaker 2: the show at patreon dot com slash Ologies for as
Speaker 2: little as a dollar a month. Thank you to everyone
Speaker 2: in ologies shirts and hats and toats from ologies meerch
Speaker 2: dot com. We have shorter, kid friendly classroom safe Smologies
Speaker 2: episodes available wherever you get podcasts or the link in
Speaker 2: the show notes. Also, thank you to everyone who leaves
Speaker 2: reviews for the show, all of which I read and
Speaker 2: they warm my heart and they help the show and
Speaker 2: I prove it by combing through them and reading a
Speaker 2: new one every week. And this is from I should
Speaker 2: be sleeping twenty five, who wrote in an age of
Speaker 2: brain rot and doom, scrolling ologies is a pinnacle of
Speaker 2: hope and brain growth. I should be sleeping twenty five.
Speaker 2: Thank you for staying awake long enough to write that.
Speaker 2: So let's get right in this episode, which I'm putting
Speaker 2: out on the night of the US election. I'm literally
Speaker 2: recording this as ballots are coming in. Tomorrow is the sixth,
Speaker 2: It's my birthday. I hope it's a good one.
Speaker 4: I hope.
Speaker 2: So, But for now, let's get into the differences between
Speaker 2: a damselfly and a dragonfly. How fast they can dart around,
Speaker 2: what cultures love and fear them, faking your own death,
Speaker 2: the scariest babies in the world, Sending dragonflies to space,
Speaker 2: sci fi aviation inspiration, mating choreography, attracting them to your
Speaker 2: yard maybe to eat them. How big they were in
Speaker 2: the age of dinosaurs, and why they were cooler than dinosaurs?
Speaker 2: With scholar, dragonfly expert, and thus owatologist, doctor Jessica Ware.
Speaker 5: My name is Jessica Ware, and I use she her pronouns.
Speaker 4: And you're in New York, right, yeah? Yes?
Speaker 2: And what is it like working with the museum is
Speaker 2: that Bonker.
Speaker 5: It's awesome. I love it. I worked at Records for
Speaker 5: ten years as a professor before coming here, and I
Speaker 5: loved it there too, in a different way. But the
Speaker 5: museum is kind of it's like than to do. It's
Speaker 5: like the best. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing I can't
Speaker 5: imagine a better job. It's really really fun.
Speaker 2: Did you go there when you were younger? Did you
Speaker 2: have like a history of going when you were or
Speaker 2: when you would come to the city, Like, what's your
Speaker 2: history with the museum?
Speaker 5: Well, I'm from Canada, so I went to the Royal
Speaker 5: Ontario Museum, the rom in Toronto, that's our naturalster museum.
Speaker 5: Took my twin and I there quite often. I remember
Speaker 5: seeing a gorilla diorama. It's like etched in my mind,
Speaker 5: this gorilla diorama. So I know I went there when
Speaker 5: I was short enough that I could barely see inside
Speaker 5: the diorama.
Speaker 2: So doctor Ware's first visit to New York's iconic American
Speaker 2: Museum of Natural History was she was a wee one.
Speaker 2: It was about twenty five years ago, but she did
Speaker 2: a postdoc there working on termite evolution, and she says
Speaker 2: she was nervous to apply for a full time position
Speaker 2: at the museum because she thought she'd be a university professor.
Speaker 2: But she just has undergrads in the summer rather than
Speaker 2: throughout the year.
Speaker 5: And I certainly never, ever, in a million years, thought
Speaker 5: that I would work here. It kind of feels like
Speaker 5: the same, but just with more time fulfilled work and
Speaker 5: more encouragement for field work.
Speaker 2: Obviously, I love bugs a lot, so I'm like, the
Speaker 2: notion of being doing field work and getting to see
Speaker 2: bugs in person as part of your job is like, what,
Speaker 2: that's a job that's so exciting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a lot of them out there, and we
Speaker 5: do a lot of stuff in the Arctic, you know,
Speaker 5: sixty eight sixty nine degrees latitude, and then we do
Speaker 5: a lot of stuff from the tropics, and they're both amazing,
Speaker 5: like insect phonic insect communities, but they're very different. I
Speaker 5: have the temperate Arctic and tropical stuff.
Speaker 2: It's fun speaking of location, location, location, Where do dragonflies live?
Speaker 2: Are there dragonflies in the Arctic? What's their range?
Speaker 5: Like? Yeah, there's dozens and punt dozens in the Arctic.
Speaker 5: There's six that are kind of whole Arctic that have
Speaker 5: a circumpolar distribution, but there's over forty I think species
Speaker 5: that live north of the Arctic circle. In general, I
Speaker 5: would say like dragonflies and damselflies are found globally everywhere
Speaker 5: except for it Arctica.
Speaker 2: So the upper Arctic reaches of the globe, but not
Speaker 2: in the snow and ice at the bottom of the globe.
Speaker 2: Although the globe's physition, really I don't know why it matters.
Speaker 2: We could be float in any which way, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean.
Speaker 5: I've collected dragonflies in Namibia, which is a very dry
Speaker 5: kind of desert y environment. Like you can find them
Speaker 5: in deserts, you can find them in mountainous regions, temperate,
Speaker 5: top arctic kind of you name it, they're there. They've
Speaker 5: been around for a really long time, so they've basically
Speaker 5: fit themselves into a lot of different niche spaces.
Speaker 2: I feel like I have a flim flam in my
Speaker 2: mind that they were at one point the size of
Speaker 2: like a couch cushion, and I feel like that is
Speaker 2: not correct. How big prehistorically were they So the proto.
Speaker 5: Kind of odineta, the pre dragonflies and damselflies, they're a
Speaker 5: group we call griffin flies. Commonly, they're in this family meganority.
Speaker 5: They flew during the carbon differst period, so like three
Speaker 5: hundred and fifty million years ago, and those were big
Speaker 5: that I just had, Like each wing was like thirty
Speaker 5: seven centimeters, so it's like it's a pretty big size individual.
Speaker 2: So each wing was almost fifteen inches long, and they
Speaker 2: were total about two feet across, weighing about a pound,
Speaker 2: so about as large as a small hawk or like
Speaker 2: a modern day crow.
Speaker 5: But crown odinate, so they're not modern, uh dragonflies. Modern
Speaker 5: dragonflies and amplifies are younger. I think, you know, fifty
Speaker 5: and twenty five million years old or so, so a.
Speaker 2: Full one hundred million years later.
Speaker 5: And depending on what you're measuring for size, right, there's
Speaker 5: either megalar prepists, which is a damsel fly that weighs
Speaker 5: almost nothing, but it has a pretty big wingspan and
Speaker 5: a very long, very very thin threadlike abdomen because it
Speaker 5: lays its eggs in tree holes. Oh, so that's a
Speaker 5: very big one in terms of just like the total
Speaker 5: measurements of centimeters. But then in terms of mass probably
Speaker 5: it would be pedalarity, which are a different family in
Speaker 5: anasop for the dragonflies, and some of the pedalarity that
Speaker 5: live in Australia. Pedalara is one pedlar gigant. Yet it's
Speaker 5: got that name for a reason. I mean it's like
Speaker 5: a good size. It's hefty, you know, it's not as
Speaker 5: long as megular papists, but it's it weighs quite a bit.
Speaker 5: So depending on if you're going for like size in
Speaker 5: terms of lengthen width or size in terms of mass,
Speaker 5: then those are the two kind of biggest ones that
Speaker 5: we have nowadays.
Speaker 2: When did they go from the gryffin flies to dragonflies?
Speaker 4: And also who's naming them?
Speaker 2: Because named after gryffins and dragons is like pretty baller,
Speaker 2: It's like pretty great.
Speaker 5: Yeah, those are some good names. I think they think that,
Speaker 5: like there was an English translation from a European language,
Speaker 5: like a Slavic language for devil fly, with this myth
Speaker 5: that there was like a devil's horse that took to
Speaker 5: the sky and maybe that's how the name dragonfly came about.
Speaker 5: Well they're not sure. So there's like a lot of
Speaker 5: common names for each of the families. Diners are the
Speaker 5: name the common name for Ashnity, and they have an
Speaker 5: oppositor that is sort of long. Although to be honest,
Speaker 5: it's not as long as some other types of dragonflies.
Speaker 5: But anyways, some people thought it look like a sewing
Speaker 5: needle because they lay their eggs and plant material, so
Speaker 5: they're called diners. But a lot of the dams of
Speaker 5: flies are related to their color. I mean, they're all
Speaker 5: very colorful, but there's jewel wings and bluets for some
Speaker 5: of the dams of fly. Names and the common names
Speaker 5: very in general sort of country back country. Although the
Speaker 5: dragonfly community is pretty tight, so I think they're trying
Speaker 5: to like come up with like more universal common names
Speaker 5: across the orders and across the order, across the families
Speaker 5: and such.
Speaker 2: Are there damselfly people and dragonfly people and do they fight?
Speaker 5: So there's, like I think odinatology in general, really tight community,
Speaker 5: really good vibes only, but you tend to focus on
Speaker 5: one or the other, although there are some exceptions. But
Speaker 5: my specialty are dragonflies, and my colleagues have buyb He
Speaker 5: really focuses on the damsel flies. I think there's a lot.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's three thousands of each of those groups, right,
Speaker 5: the three thousand dams of fly, three thousand dragonflies ish
Speaker 5: and they do slightly different things. They all have fresh
Speaker 5: water namps, but the damselflies have gills that are external
Speaker 5: and the dragonflies have internal gills. Dragonflies are kind of
Speaker 5: stocky bodied, and some of them have lost their overpositors,
Speaker 5: so they lay their eggs on the surface of water.
Speaker 5: None of the damselflies do that. They all they their
Speaker 5: eggs and plants, so I feel like already like they're
Speaker 5: kind of a little bit different.
Speaker 2: So both damsel and dragonflies have an equal number of species,
Speaker 2: like a whopping three thousand each, and both their bibis
Speaker 2: or their nymphs sometimes called naiads, live in water, and
Speaker 2: we're going to get to those absolute killing machines in
Speaker 2: a bit. But again, dragonflies have internal gills and kind
Speaker 2: of fatter bodies. Both very cool. But let's say that
Speaker 2: a damsel flies kind of like a coop or a
Speaker 2: sedan while the other is an suv.
Speaker 5: And I'm like firmly on team dragonfly. But I've published
Speaker 5: some stuff with like Olafink, and I published on Megala
Speaker 5: prepis on that really big damselfly. I mean, there's a
Speaker 5: lot of interesting things in damsel flies. I guess I
Speaker 5: just like I really love dragonflies.
Speaker 2: Do damselfly people do their feelings get hurt when people
Speaker 2: call damselflies dragonflies when there's the smaller, skinnier ones and
Speaker 2: everyone's like, oh, dragonfly. Do you think there's a damselfly
Speaker 2: researcher who's just looking at their hands and wistfully walks
Speaker 2: home crying.
Speaker 5: I think a lot of that's just used the word dragonfly.
Speaker 5: They mean both. But in general, if you said dragonflies,
Speaker 5: people think that you mean all of it in Nata
Speaker 5: and yeah, so I think they would. They would just
Speaker 5: think it was normal. They wouldn't they wouldn't be sad.
Speaker 2: Their life cycle is really fascinating to me. The nymphs
Speaker 2: are bonkers from what I understand, and they look so
Speaker 2: different from the adults. Can you tell me a little
Speaker 2: bit about what their infancy and adolescence is like before
Speaker 2: they become the dragonflies that we see around.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure. Well, So, females lay their eggs either
Speaker 5: in plant material and a pittic over position that's called
Speaker 5: or on the surface of the water or the mud
Speaker 5: exophytic over position that's.
Speaker 2: Called damsel flies, and no fittic implants. Dragonflies exophittic, not
Speaker 2: in plants, and in.
Speaker 5: Neither case the egg hatches when it developed in freshwater.
Speaker 5: There's like a couple of examples of things that we
Speaker 5: think are a semi terrestrial where they've been found kind
Speaker 5: of like walking in the moss around freshwater. But in
Speaker 5: general they're inhabiting freshwater. There's a couple that have burrows,
Speaker 5: like some of the pedalarity that I talked about, they
Speaker 5: actually have burrows. And there's Somatachlora and Emerald in North
Speaker 5: America that utilizes crayfish burrows. But like in general, the
Speaker 5: eggs kind of settle somewhere in the water column or
Speaker 5: down at the bottom of the on the substrate. The
Speaker 5: nymphs hatch, and if they're juvenile damsel flies, then they
Speaker 5: have these external gills that they used to breathe with.
Speaker 5: And if they're dragonflies, then they have these internal gills,
Speaker 5: these rectal pads that they used to breathe with.
Speaker 2: Yes, rectal gills. Nymphs can stick their dump trucks in
Speaker 2: the air and breathe through their butts. These ass gasping
Speaker 2: babies are hungry. No one is safe.
Speaker 5: They eat each other, They eat other aquatic insects, the
Speaker 5: mosquito larvae, dabs, and fly larvae. May fly larvae cainterfly
Speaker 5: livery things like that. They can also eat small fish
Speaker 5: like minnows, and they can eat tadpoles and depending on
Speaker 5: the taxon, some of them develop in like six weeks.
Speaker 5: There's a migratory dragonfly called Pentella flavescence. The global wanderer
Speaker 5: or wandering glider are two common names people use for it,
Speaker 5: and it develops really fast in like six weeks. In general,
Speaker 5: it kind of often takes advantage of like temporary water
Speaker 5: that pulls up after rain, so it kind of makes
Speaker 5: sense it would be selected to develop kind of quickly.
Speaker 4: And then on the.
Speaker 5: Other extreme, there are things that develop over years and
Speaker 5: in some extreme examples people have said decades where the
Speaker 5: juveniles basically are in fresh water for quite a long time,
Speaker 5: kind of slowly molting and then becoming an adult. So
Speaker 5: in the arctic systems that we are doing a lot
Speaker 5: of sampling, and those juveniles are actually frozen in the
Speaker 5: wintertime and they freeze in thaw freezing thought. And even
Speaker 5: in the temperate systems like in northern Ontario, like or
Speaker 5: Minana lives, the lake freezes solids right, so the nymphs
Speaker 5: are either burrowing down into the substrate or in part freezing.
Speaker 5: So just like for all insects, right, there's these like
Speaker 5: rise and fall of hormones, So juvenile hormone like those
Speaker 5: things kind of rise and fall, and then when the
Speaker 5: timing is right, the hormone levels are right, then they
Speaker 5: have their final molt to adulthood. And what happens in
Speaker 5: that case is they have a trigger to kind of
Speaker 5: crawl out of the water, and they usually cling to
Speaker 5: like some veg or like a boat house or a
Speaker 5: dock or like whatever thing that they can cling to,
Speaker 5: and then the adult kind of pulls itself out of
Speaker 5: this larval skin, which are called xuvia. I think in
Speaker 5: Europe they call them imagines, but anyways, are those are
Speaker 5: kind of left behind. So often you can find axuvia
Speaker 5: or imagines kind of in the veg around fresh water.
Speaker 2: These exsuvia, in my unasked for opinion, are gorgeous to behold.
Speaker 2: And if you look closely in the summer around lakes
Speaker 2: or ponds, you might find papery, empty ghost shells of
Speaker 2: dragon fine nymphs, and they look a little bit like
Speaker 2: cicada molts if you've ever seen one of those. And
Speaker 2: these little insect husks get their name eksuvia from meaning
Speaker 2: things stripped from a body, and I like to imagine
Speaker 2: that the young dragonfly was like felt raptured, just ascended
Speaker 2: to fly through the air and then left their exuvia
Speaker 2: behind like pants.
Speaker 5: Then the adult has to take some time it's wings
Speaker 5: develop in while they're crumpled up in these wing pads
Speaker 5: while they're larvae or nymphs. And then when they become
Speaker 5: an adult, they kind of shunt their hem on the
Speaker 5: fat and they kind of stretch their wings out. They
Speaker 5: slowly dry and we call harden up when they're first
Speaker 5: emerged with a very soft body, very vulnerable, and then
Speaker 5: once they've hardened up, then they take off and they
Speaker 5: eat as much as they can. They build up fat stores,
Speaker 5: and then they're they're adults, and they just do things
Speaker 5: adults do, which is meaning dispersing and you know, laying eggs.
Speaker 2: Do they even eat as adults or do they do
Speaker 2: all their eating as little like hungry hungry hippos under
Speaker 2: the water.
Speaker 5: No, they eat a lot as adults, so do depending
Speaker 5: on the text on. Some of them have a lot
Speaker 5: of spines on their tibia, and they actually are kind
Speaker 5: of like bringing food in towards their mouth as they're flying.
Speaker 5: Often if you see dragonflies, they do this behavior called hawking,
Speaker 5: or they'll kind of be flying. Often you see it,
Speaker 5: like if you live in suburbia, like over you know
Speaker 5: a lawn, or if you're near a meadow in a
Speaker 5: more rural setting, you see them kind of flying often
Speaker 5: at desk or in the middle of the afternoon. That's
Speaker 5: what they're doing, kind of gliding back and forth, just eating,
Speaker 5: and they have to build up quite a bit of
Speaker 5: fat stores, and they use those fat stores for their flight,
Speaker 5: which is really energetically expensive. But then also like when
Speaker 5: they're mating, some dragonflies and damsel flies are territorial, and
Speaker 5: so they do these mating kind of dances or these
Speaker 5: flights competitions, and you need to have a lot of
Speaker 5: fat stores for that. Often what dragonflies will do is
Speaker 5: they'll en damsel flies is that they'll just fly until
Speaker 5: they'll use up their fat stores and then they just
Speaker 5: kind of drop into the water. They did so like
Speaker 5: in their best interests, they would be selected to kind
Speaker 5: of be constantly eating to keep their fat stores high.
Speaker 2: So they eat and they fly doing cardio until they
Speaker 2: get fatally shredded, and then they just have a burial,
Speaker 2: let's see, or at pond. I had no idea that
Speaker 2: they were out there hunting too. How long typically, I
Speaker 2: know it must range from like a day to like
Speaker 2: ten years or something. But how long does dragonfly live
Speaker 2: once it is an adult? How long is it out
Speaker 2: flying around?
Speaker 5: So it's always around the same. So the juvenile stage
Speaker 5: can vary six weeks to maybe decades, maybe two decades.
Speaker 2: Who knows, right, that's bonkers.
Speaker 5: But I think like five years would be like an
Speaker 5: oldish And there's a couple of extreme outliers, but often
Speaker 5: there one or two years, you know, three or four years.
Speaker 2: That's just the nymph stage, either from six weeks to
Speaker 2: a decad.
Speaker 5: But then the adult stage is usually like one hot summer, right,
Speaker 5: So usually in temperate regions it's like from May to
Speaker 5: maybe October. There's a couple of examples individuals that were
Speaker 5: around for several months, but it's definitely not usually more
Speaker 5: than a year, and it would definitely be less than
Speaker 5: a year in most cases. So the adult stage, they
Speaker 5: really have this like solitary goal of dispersing, mating and
Speaker 5: laying their eggs like that that's their whole thing. It's
Speaker 5: not really doing growth or maintenance.
Speaker 2: Right, So it's like a longer adolescence and a shorter
Speaker 2: adulthood essentially.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, for sure, with the exception of, like I said,
Speaker 5: the wandering glider or global wanderer, the pentelifa essence, it's
Speaker 5: six weeks development time and then it lives for a
Speaker 5: couple of months. So that's one where it's reverse. But
Speaker 5: in the majority of cases than the juvenile is a
Speaker 5: longer stage than the adult. For a lot of dragonflies,
Speaker 5: Stam supplies.
Speaker 2: I feel like I know people with dragonfly tattoos. I
Speaker 2: know people who see dragon.
Speaker 5: Do you I have one?
Speaker 2: Gorgeous How long have you had it?
Speaker 5: Uh, maybe ten years or something like that. I've had
Speaker 5: it for a while.
Speaker 2: So doctor Ware pushed up her long sleeved shirt and
Speaker 2: showed me what looked like a silhouette of a dragonfly.
Speaker 2: Of course it was a beautiful artwork, so on brand.
Speaker 2: You had already been studying dragonflies at that point. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you were in it. You're like seeing dragonfly committed.
Speaker 5: Actually I have a damsel fly. I don't have a dragonfly.
Speaker 2: I was wrong, a damselfly tattoo. This was surprising.
Speaker 5: It's an ebony jewel wing collapterrics maculata. But I picked
Speaker 5: this one because the wings themselves are like black in color,
Speaker 5: and so I thought it would be easy for a
Speaker 5: tattoo artist to do it without Sometimes, like the venation
Speaker 5: is very important. It's Karlai with like flight behavior, So
Speaker 5: if they did the veins wrong on the tattoo, I
Speaker 5: would know that it was wrong that it couldn't fly right.
Speaker 5: So I was like a little bit anxious about having
Speaker 5: a tattoo that I was gonna dislike afterwards if the
Speaker 5: venation was a right.
Speaker 2: So collopterix mechilata means beautiful wing. And this ebony jewel
Speaker 2: wing damsel fly has a slender, metallic blue green body
Speaker 2: looks like a sports car paint chop, and wings that
Speaker 2: look almost opaque, like a velvety black with subtly visible
Speaker 2: vey nation.
Speaker 4: That's what I was going to ask you.
Speaker 2: How many times do you see dragonfly tattoos and things
Speaker 2: in pop culture that are anatomically not right.
Speaker 5: Well, most of the time people put really long and tenny,
Speaker 5: and dragonflies and damselflies have very very very small almost
Speaker 5: like not visible and tenny. They're very very very small.
Speaker 5: So if you have something with long antenna. It's usually
Speaker 5: an antlon or something like that. So a lot of
Speaker 5: people they're like, oh, I have this dragonfly tattooer, and
Speaker 5: then they show it to me and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 5: it's an ant line or it's like a derraptra, But
Speaker 5: of course I don't say that because heavy root. So
Speaker 5: I'm just like, oh, that's very cool, because I think
Speaker 5: it's cool. They want to get an ad a tattoo,
Speaker 5: but if it has long antennae. I actually said that
Speaker 5: to my tattooer this when he was doing this tattoo.
Speaker 5: The first sketch. I was like, oh no, no, no,
Speaker 5: antenna gotta go.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 5: No, They're like, my insects have antenna, and I'm like, no,
Speaker 5: dragonflies and damseflies, you wouldn't see them. They're almost like, no,
Speaker 5: we can't have them on there. I'm not gonna have
Speaker 5: inter rapt attestee.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 5: I mean not that they're not cool too, but no.
Speaker 2: I love that that timetoo artists has probably thought about
Speaker 2: you every single time they've seen a dragonfly.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: He said he.
Speaker 5: Had just been a tattoo for his wife and he
Speaker 5: was like, oh, thank goodness, I didn't put long antenna
Speaker 5: on hers because she didn't want them. And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's very.
Speaker 4: Good, get very good.
Speaker 2: What about what was your ambassador bug species? Was it
Speaker 2: a dragonfly or what got you out looking around for bugs?
Speaker 5: Well? I spent a lot of time like near water,
Speaker 5: because I lived in Canada and we spent a lot
Speaker 5: of time with my maternal grandparents and they lived on
Speaker 5: a lake like Muscoca, and so we saw a lot
Speaker 5: of dragonflies and damsel flies for sure, But I didn't
Speaker 5: I didn't think I was gonna ever study them. To
Speaker 5: be honest, I was curious about them, but like we
Speaker 5: were kind of curious about the natural world, I would say,
Speaker 5: like in general. But then when I went to give
Speaker 5: me Seawa to University of Fish, Columbia for my undergrad
Speaker 5: and I was going to do marine biology, but I
Speaker 5: ended up switching into entomology. My first undergrad experience doing
Speaker 5: field work was working on messistic aster, which is sister
Speaker 5: to that big one that I talked about, meguelaprepis. It's
Speaker 5: a damselflyning and it lays its eggs and bermelia plants
Speaker 5: and it was really fun. But I still was like, oh,
Speaker 5: like this stuff is so cool, there's no way I
Speaker 5: could ever contribute to this because all the cool stuff
Speaker 5: has been done. There's no way. So I'll just go
Speaker 5: do something very practical and work on food security and
Speaker 5: maybe do biological control. So that's what I went to
Speaker 5: grad school to do. But then I ended up not
Speaker 5: really loving entomopathogenic nematodes as much as you think you would.
Speaker 5: You think you'd be like, wow, that's a page turner.
Speaker 5: Turns out wasn't turning a page for me. And then,
Speaker 5: thank goodness, Mike May, my hero, my late advisor, unfortunately
Speaker 5: passed away last year. But he was one of the
Speaker 5: world's dragonfly X where it's a foremost odinatologist, and I
Speaker 5: switched into his lab and he said to me, what
Speaker 5: are you talking about? There are so many unanswered questions
Speaker 5: for odinates, like so many, like many many lifetimes worth
Speaker 5: of work to do. And his encouragement was really wonderful.
Speaker 2: That's so sweet and so interesting how paths can change
Speaker 2: just in an instant from someone that you meet, or
Speaker 2: from one thing that a person says, And that changed
Speaker 2: the course of the field just by encouraging someone to
Speaker 2: be like, no hop in here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we got a lot of questions.
Speaker 5: I mean, Mike I think changed odinatology. Well, he certainly
Speaker 5: changed the way that I even looked at science because
Speaker 5: he was exactly that person that was always like, oh,
Speaker 5: you want to come here, let me hold the door
Speaker 5: open for you, you know. And he made a community that
Speaker 5: everyone wanted to be part of, where everyone was able
Speaker 5: to participate. Like, if you like dragonflies, you're in. That's
Speaker 5: only requirements that you have to sort of like them.
Speaker 5: And I think the whole community was so much better
Speaker 5: for that philosophy. But if that's your grounding philosophy, everyone
Speaker 5: who wants to join can join. I mean, no wonder,
Speaker 5: it's such a great community.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And what are what are odentotologists studying? What are
Speaker 2: you looking at now?
Speaker 5: It's a lot, I mean it varies. Right, Mike wasn't wrong.
Speaker 5: There's so much left to be done right, so much
Speaker 5: that we don't know. With some collaborators Seth, I mentioned
Speaker 5: John Vincent, Rob Paul, there's a few of us. We
Speaker 5: work together with my post doc Lacy and some graduate students.
Speaker 5: We're trying to get like the tree of life of
Speaker 5: dragonflies down.
Speaker 2: She says that by dragonflies she means both them and damselflies,
Speaker 2: and they're working on specifically sequencing as many species as
Speaker 2: possible to figure out who's related to whom and where
Speaker 2: their tree of life branched in these different directions.
Speaker 5: In my lab, I'm really interested in reproductive evolution, so
Speaker 5: the evolution of like male reproductive structures, female reproductive structures.
Speaker 5: Some people in other labs are interested in vision or
Speaker 5: like ops and pigments, or others are inter really interested
Speaker 5: in particular types of behavior or nymph for larval behavior.
Speaker 5: I guess it really varies, like you name it, somebody's
Speaker 5: working on it, female storage organs, color, structural pigmentation, the
Speaker 5: chemical composition of wings. The nymphs, they as you mentioned,
Speaker 5: look very different from the adult and they feed with
Speaker 5: this thing called a labial mass, which kind of like
Speaker 5: is this mouth part that kind of shoots outwards and
Speaker 5: grabs the prey and then brings in towards their mandibles.
Speaker 3: Well, that's terrifying.
Speaker 5: Sebastian Boosa and others are like looking at the functional
Speaker 5: morphology of that structure. So I think, like, as you
Speaker 5: look globally, there's a lot of people working on very
Speaker 5: very cool questions, and I feel like they're all complementary,
Speaker 5: like they all are fitting together to tell this story of, like,
Speaker 5: you know, the last three hundred million years of evolution
Speaker 5: for this group.
Speaker 4: Is there a group text for.
Speaker 5: I mean kind of there's like an ode at a
Speaker 5: list serve, I guess. And there's lots of dragonfly groups.
Speaker 5: But there's like a Worldwide Dragonfly Association, the WDA. We
Speaker 5: have dragonfly meetings every two years, and so that's a
Speaker 5: good chance for people to kind of come together. There's
Speaker 5: a Black Odontology group has a lot of people from
Speaker 5: West Africa, but really people globally. There's this Society ad
Speaker 5: Analogical Latin Americano, which is for Central and South America,
Speaker 5: and everyone collaborates together, which is wonderful.
Speaker 2: Can I ask you some questions from patrons about those facets?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, these are listeners who know you're coming on.
Speaker 4: They have dragonfly questions.
Speaker 2: Anything that comes up in terms of charity or anything
Speaker 2: associated with Mike too in his honor that you'd want
Speaker 2: to donate to.
Speaker 5: Oh, that's very nice. Mike was the former president of
Speaker 5: the World Dragonfly Association, so was I, and so that
Speaker 5: might be a good one. That's a five oh one
Speaker 5: C and the mission and goal is to really promote
Speaker 5: the study of dragonflies and damsel flies worldwide, and so
Speaker 5: any donations that go to them help to They have
Speaker 5: a a journal that they publish and then they also
Speaker 5: use it for funding for students to go to conferences.
Speaker 5: This dragon by meaning which is so fun, So every
Speaker 5: two years, so that might be a good one to Okay,
Speaker 5: that's great, thank you.
Speaker 2: So each episode we donate to a cause of the
Speaker 2: ologist choosing, and this week it's going to the World
Speaker 2: Dragonfly Association in honor of doctor Michael Love May Literally
Speaker 2: this guy's middle name was Love and I found his
Speaker 2: obituary and it describes him as a fair, compassionate and
Speaker 2: caring mentor, a scholar and a naturalist, but also a
Speaker 2: gentle kind man who spoiled dogs, took children seriously, and
Speaker 2: loved his wife with great devotion. As a friend, he
Speaker 2: was amusing, tolerant, and loyal. As a father above all perceptive,
Speaker 2: and as a beloved husband, he was thoughtful and generous,
Speaker 2: a partner eager to share the world. So a donation
Speaker 2: will be made in his name to the World Dragonfly Association.
Speaker 2: Thanks to sponsors of the show, Your Flat Out and
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Speaker 2: Okay, let's dip in your questions Damsel's Drug Flies. Patrons
Speaker 2: YouTube can submit questions, even audio questions to get your
Speaker 2: voice on the show by contributing to patreon dot com
Speaker 2: slash Ologies. It starts at a dollar a month. Now,
Speaker 2: this first question comes from patrons Hope J and first
Speaker 2: time question asker Turner Pierce. So you mentioned you were
Speaker 2: looking at reproductive structures, and Hope J and Turner Pierce
Speaker 2: wanted to know is your sexual dimorphism. Is there a
Speaker 2: way to distinguish a male and female dragonfly?
Speaker 5: Absolutely, So what you'll do is, when you're looking at
Speaker 5: the dragonfly, you want to look at the base of
Speaker 5: the abdomen. So males are unique in that they have
Speaker 5: two sets of reproductive structures. So they have a penis
Speaker 5: at the tip of their abdomen from which sperm is
Speaker 5: ejaculated and they put it into a second penis which
Speaker 5: is at the base of their abdomen. H two of them,
Speaker 5: and this second penis is called the visicas formalice. It's
Speaker 5: a sperm pump, and they use that second penis to
Speaker 5: transfer the sperm into the female, so it's indirect sperm transfer,
Speaker 5: but they also use that second penis to displace the
Speaker 5: previous male sperm. Because females can store sperm, she has
Speaker 5: both short term and long term sperm storage organs, the
Speaker 5: sperm atika and the burst of copula tricks. So males
Speaker 5: use the secondary penis to either scrape out the previous
Speaker 5: male sperm or like pack deeply in the previous male sperm,
Speaker 5: like displace it in some way, and then they transferm
Speaker 5: they're ejaculate, just.
Speaker 2: Gonna kind of move this out of the way, like
Speaker 2: if you went to a potluck and you threw away
Speaker 2: someone else's cast role or just hid it in a cabinet.
Speaker 5: And so you can look at it under a scanning
Speaker 5: electron microscope, and it's very cool because a lot of
Speaker 5: variation on a theme like selection has acted, so lots
Speaker 5: of different species have slightly different things and look like
Speaker 5: a scoop, some looks like ragged claws. Like it really varies.
Speaker 3: Ah.
Speaker 5: But if you don't have a microscope a scanning left
Speaker 5: her microscope and you're just holding a dragonfly, or if
Speaker 5: you're just up close looking at it, if it's perch somewhere,
Speaker 5: just look at the base of their abdomen near where
Speaker 5: it meets the thorac and if there's a bump there,
Speaker 5: that's the penis, right, Because the females have a very
Speaker 5: smooth ventral part of their abdomen. There's no ridges, there's
Speaker 5: no bumps there. So if you see something that looks
Speaker 5: like a little bump or a little notch kind of
Speaker 5: sticking at the base of the first second third kind
Speaker 5: of segment of the abdomen, then that's the secondary penis,
Speaker 5: and you know you have a male. There's other things
Speaker 5: that you sometimes not all things have color dimorphisms, but
Speaker 5: some do. In a lot of dams of flies, there's
Speaker 5: variation in the wing color pattern between males and females.
Speaker 5: So this tattoo that I have is Collopteris maculata, and
Speaker 5: the males have completely black wings, but the females it's
Speaker 5: dusky and not completely black. So there's like variations like that.
Speaker 5: And then in a lot of males, they actually have
Speaker 5: like a waxy with the colored prunescence, like a waxy
Speaker 5: secretion that coats their whole body that they get with
Speaker 5: age with maturity, and that gives them a bluish hue.
Speaker 5: So often males and females, for example, the eastern pond
Speaker 5: hop is bright green as a male and female, but
Speaker 5: over time, as a male's older, they se creeped this
Speaker 5: wax over their body. And then they end up looking
Speaker 5: completely blue.
Speaker 2: It's like graying at the temple, sort of like okay,
Speaker 2: silver fox almost yeah, blue fox.
Speaker 4: Oh man. What about colors in general?
Speaker 2: And many of you including Rowan Tree, Kyla Ce Mouse,
Speaker 2: Pakston eating dog Hair for a Living, Earl of Gramlkin,
Speaker 2: Rachel Pistacco, Charlotte Parkinson, Jesse Meeks, Adam T Burns, Rachel Fallon,
Speaker 2: Airy Fox, Popsicle Emperor, Flazitron, Brian Shenanigan's Hope, Jay Devin
Speaker 2: Jay Shay, Jackie g Nicole s and Alta Sparks also
Speaker 2: asked about this as well as Turner. Pearce wanted to
Speaker 2: know are they all colorful and irid? Doesn't that coloring
Speaker 2: make them more appealing to predators? Alissa Hoff Sedoni s
Speaker 2: A bunch of different people wanted to know why are
Speaker 2: they so colorful? Alyssa asked are their colors for specific
Speaker 2: reason for mating? For predators? Scare away reasons?
Speaker 5: Those are good questions, I would say, so, first of all,
Speaker 5: are they all colorful?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 5: Not really, most of them are. There's two types of color.
Speaker 5: There's structural color where there's like bumps on their cuticle,
Speaker 5: and when light bounces off of it, it's perceived as
Speaker 5: a color. Often the metallic colored ones are like that,
Speaker 5: and that's a structural color, and the ones that have
Speaker 5: structural color. It's very cool because in the fossils that
Speaker 5: we have, not all, but in some of the fossils
Speaker 5: that we have, the compression fossil also has the same
Speaker 5: bumps and rugosities, so then when the light bounces off
Speaker 5: of it, it looks like it's a metallic green, which
Speaker 5: is very cool. But then there's also just pigment granules
Speaker 5: in their epithelial cells, and some dragonflies that's how their
Speaker 5: coloration exist from these pigment granules, and the pigment can vary, right,
Speaker 5: Some have melonains, some muma crumbs, like, there's very various
Speaker 5: types of pigment, and so there are some things that
Speaker 5: fly at night, like the shadow dragons is the common
Speaker 5: name of this genus neuro Cordulia that flies when it's
Speaker 5: too dark to kind of read a newspaper, and they
Speaker 5: are not very colorful. They're very drab, as you might
Speaker 5: expect because they're flying at night. Right, Dragonflies don't have
Speaker 5: great vision at night. They're very good at seeing things
Speaker 5: in the day, but not as good at seeing things
Speaker 5: at night, and so I guess there's just been selection
Speaker 5: for a loss of the bright color. And they're kind
Speaker 5: of dravish brown in color.
Speaker 2: So those metallic greens and blues aren't pigment based, but
Speaker 2: rather the shape and the texture of the kitan that
Speaker 2: makes up their exoskeleton, just like how many blue bird
Speaker 2: feathers are structural and you may have learned that in
Speaker 2: the Plumology episode about feathers, which will link in the shutouts.
Speaker 2: But other colors are pigment based, kind of like the
Speaker 2: color of our hair and skin.
Speaker 5: And in terms of why they're colorful, a lot of
Speaker 5: the patterns that you see are for sexual signaling, so
Speaker 5: male like the patterns in their wings might be for
Speaker 5: signaling male signaling to other males, males and females communicating
Speaker 5: to each other. But then there's also color patterns that
Speaker 5: relate to thermal regulation. So males and females are able
Speaker 5: to kind of have their pigment granules migrate up and
Speaker 5: down in their epithelial cells to give them like a
Speaker 5: bright color or a dark color, and the ideas maybe
Speaker 5: that the dark color allows them to absorb more heat
Speaker 5: and the bright color to kind of shed more heat.
Speaker 5: There's some idea, yeah, that maybe this waxy pronescence is
Speaker 5: to prevent desiccation anti aging technique here. There are others.
Speaker 5: Pleathemasidia is a good one. The white tail where the
Speaker 5: abdomen itself is actually like a kind of a bright
Speaker 5: white color, and some people have suggested that perhaps that's
Speaker 5: to allow it to kind of it's a perture and
Speaker 5: it often perches out in the sun, and so that
Speaker 5: allows it to kind of shint a lot of heat
Speaker 5: out of its body. So I think there's a combination
Speaker 5: of factors in terms of whether or not it can
Speaker 5: make you more visible or less visible to predators. I mean,
Speaker 5: Amanda Wispeld did her thesis on this damselfly called rjapicalis,
Speaker 5: which actually changes its color right after mating. Males actually
Speaker 5: change their color to being in a dark phase versus
Speaker 5: bright phase, and she argued that it had a lot
Speaker 5: to do with predation, right, so it allows them to
Speaker 5: be less visible.
Speaker 2: And this is also a flex So.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think there's a lot of possibilities, and
Speaker 5: some of those might be happening at the same time,
Speaker 5: so more than one of those things could be happening
Speaker 5: at the same time them a regulation, sexual signaling and
Speaker 5: avoidance of predators.
Speaker 2: Going back to reproduction, so many people. Jesse Crawford said,
Speaker 2: what's the deal with the way they mate? Which is
Speaker 2: a broad question, but what's the deal? Jesse says, I've
Speaker 2: seen what I assume is the male with the end
Speaker 2: of his tail inserted into the back of the female's head.
Speaker 2: What's going on? How are they actually getting it on?
Speaker 2: Devin Naples wants to know when I see two dragonflies
Speaker 2: fluttering about attached to each other, are they doing what
Speaker 2: I think they're doing? Are they making will be dragonfly
Speaker 2: sexy times? A lot of people want to know what's
Speaker 2: going on there, key Lime Pie, Ranial Mandre, Bjorn fred Berg,
Speaker 2: Rachel Guthrie, Mallory Skinner, Sophia A. Clover, and Alissa Hoff,
Speaker 2: who asked do they do butt stuff? I see them
Speaker 2: stuck together by their butts. Cheesemonger wanted to know why
Speaker 2: do they appear to keep banging while flying? Seems fun,
Speaker 2: but Jennifer Frow said, why not land and do that
Speaker 2: with storm? Adding seems like a hard way to do it.
Speaker 2: Let's get into it.
Speaker 5: So the heart shape wheel that you see of the
Speaker 5: males and females together. We call it the copulatory wheel,
Speaker 5: and that indeed is usually males and females doing mating
Speaker 5: ritt like as broadly defined. Right, Often what they're doing
Speaker 5: while they're flying around isn't necessarily the male ejaculating, right
Speaker 5: because member males make the sperm and the tip of
Speaker 5: their abdomen in that first penis put it into the
Speaker 5: sperm pump. But then before any sharing of their genetic information,
Speaker 5: they do the sperm displacement, so the scraping right.
Speaker 7: Ah.
Speaker 5: That yes, So when males want to mate with a female,
Speaker 5: they have these appendages at the tip of their abdomen,
Speaker 5: called the anal appendages or the claspers, and they grab
Speaker 5: the female behind the back of her head, on the
Speaker 5: back of her thorax. In some damsel flies, there's actually
Speaker 5: pits in the back of the female's thorax, and the
Speaker 5: males fit their appendages into these pits, and it's kind
Speaker 5: of like a lock and key mechanism and a lot
Speaker 5: of ordinates. It's not like that the males just kind
Speaker 5: of grab wildly. Sometimes they do damage the eyes because
Speaker 5: the males can walk on the back of the female's eyes,
Speaker 5: and you can see female with damage to the back
Speaker 5: of her eyes because omitidia are fragile and they can
Speaker 5: break with the tarsi and the tarsal claws kind of
Speaker 5: locking on them.
Speaker 2: So this copulatory wheel, it looks like two dragonflies locked
Speaker 2: in kind of a heart shape, but actually it's the
Speaker 2: female of the species getting her head hooked and maybe
Speaker 2: her eyes clawed while mating. I don't want to talk
Speaker 2: about it or think about it today, but at least
Speaker 2: female dragonflies have options.
Speaker 5: So the male clasps the female and then the female
Speaker 5: has a choice, right she can bring her abdomen up
Speaker 5: to the secondary genitalia right at the base of his
Speaker 5: abdomen for the sperm transfer or not. And sometimes you
Speaker 5: see males holding females and she does not bring her
Speaker 5: adomen up. In theory, with the lock and key mechanism,
Speaker 5: if the key doesn't fit in the lock properly, then
Speaker 5: maybe the female won't bring her admin up because it's
Speaker 5: a sign that it's not the right species. Right, those
Speaker 5: are kind of species specific locking keys. Well, like I said,
Speaker 5: not all ordinates have a lock and key mechanism. So
Speaker 5: when the female and the males enter this copulatory wheel.
Speaker 5: They can either stay purchase somewhere, or they can fly together.
Speaker 5: Sometimes they fly together where both of them are flapping
Speaker 5: their wings, but in other species only the male flaps
Speaker 5: his wings, which really affects his white behavior.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: Sometimes males and females after the sperm is transferred, they
Speaker 5: let go of each other and the male will either
Speaker 5: like piece i'm out no contact guarding, or the males
Speaker 5: will do what's called non contact guarding. Will they'll stay
Speaker 5: near the female while she lays her eggs, and they'll
Speaker 5: chase away other males because of course, if another male
Speaker 5: grabs a female, he'll just scrape out the male's sperm,
Speaker 5: right and he wants to assure interperternity. That's called non
Speaker 5: contact guarding, where they just chase away other males. And
Speaker 5: then the other option is contact guarding, and that's where
Speaker 5: the males and females stay attached to each other right
Speaker 5: through as the female's laying her eggs.
Speaker 2: So they can piece i'm out. They can be a
Speaker 2: bouncer to the female kind of on the lookout, or
Speaker 2: they can just stay attached.
Speaker 5: There's a couple of wacky exceptions called interrupted and there
Speaker 5: more males will like let go of a female grab
Speaker 5: her again, let her femal grab her again, But those
Speaker 5: are It's more common that it's either like no guarding whatsoever,
Speaker 5: non contact guarding, or it's contact guarding this tandem.
Speaker 2: So how long does it take between receiving the sperm
Speaker 2: and laying an egg is it? Are they able to
Speaker 2: do it like quicker than you can get a pizza,
Speaker 2: or are they is he guarding her for like days?
Speaker 5: Oh? Yeah, like quicker than you can get a pizza
Speaker 5: for sure. People used to think that maybe like the
Speaker 5: last sperm in was the first sperm out that she
Speaker 5: would fertilize her eggs with. We don't think that's necessarily
Speaker 5: true anymore. But she's able to lay eggs pretty much
Speaker 5: right away. Some dragonflies have their eggs ripen in batches.
Speaker 5: This has work that Camilla cock and urintilan did. They
Speaker 5: lay their eggs in batches, But other dragonflies, the majority
Speaker 5: of them have their eggs ripe all the time. So
Speaker 5: as soon as she has sperms she can lay her eggs.
Speaker 5: She needs to find suitable habitat That's often why you
Speaker 5: see dragonflies mating at water, because then they're right there
Speaker 5: and then the waters are there. And they can lay
Speaker 5: their eggs.
Speaker 4: What about her overpositor?
Speaker 2: Is that something that you can also see if you
Speaker 2: happen to have a dragonfly land on you.
Speaker 5: Sure, it depends on the dragonfly. So if it's a damselfly,
Speaker 5: they all will have an ovipositor. If it's a dragonfly
Speaker 5: in the Darner family or the asinity, the pedalarity, which
Speaker 5: are the pedal tails or the cordula gastrity, they have
Speaker 5: pretty honk and they're called spike tails because their overpositor
Speaker 5: is really long.
Speaker 2: Imagine a skinny little fingernail at the tip of your behind.
Speaker 5: It's like hello those ones, and you definitely will see
Speaker 5: the overpositor looks like a small little blade in some
Speaker 5: cases serrated. It's a series of gun apopthesies that kind
Speaker 5: of fit together in this interlocking device. It's like a
Speaker 5: little knife that cuts a hole in plant material to
Speaker 5: put the eggs in. But if you were to catch
Speaker 5: the most species rich, two groups are the liberal looidea
Speaker 5: and the gomfity. The club tails are the gomfity and
Speaker 5: the liberaloidea are things like skimmers and emeralds. Both of
Speaker 5: those groups have lost their overpositor, so you wouldn't see it.
Speaker 5: You would just see like if you flip them over,
Speaker 5: you would see what's called a vulver lamina kind of
Speaker 5: just like a little flap, and they square out their
Speaker 5: eggs like in a clump from that little flap.
Speaker 4: They don't even need an overpositor, like it's fine.
Speaker 5: No, no overpositive because they're not using plant material. So
Speaker 5: you really only need the overpositor to put it into plants.
Speaker 2: And then do those eggs hatch in the plants and
Speaker 2: then crawl and find water and then live their life
Speaker 2: as adolescents when they are in plant material.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they I mean, it's pretty fast. They don't lay
Speaker 5: them like up in a tree or anything like that.
Speaker 5: Like they're laid right at the water surface. And then
Speaker 5: you can sometimes even see on plants the scars where
Speaker 5: the eggs have been laid.
Speaker 4: Oh that's awesome.
Speaker 2: So well, usually damsel flies are more delicate looking.
Speaker 4: The largest of.
Speaker 2: The odinates is a damsel fly, so the smallest is
Speaker 2: actually a dragonfly, so that's a little flippy floppy. And
Speaker 2: skimmers our dragonflies like the bright red ones you might see,
Speaker 2: but skimmers are called chasers in some countries. Now darners again,
Speaker 2: have that long overpositor and are super fast flyers. But
Speaker 2: now you can just go get a bug book and
Speaker 2: start kind of gacking at all of them. But if
Speaker 2: you are less into outside and books and more into
Speaker 2: inside and screens. We had media questions from Guido Fairy,
Speaker 2: Mamma Bee and Dad Aussie, Scott Hanley and Amanda loves
Speaker 2: Kurt questions about pop culture. Oh yeah, someone asked, this
Speaker 2: is very specific. Claire Ritchie said, carry Colby Voice. A dragonfly,
Speaker 2: a dragonfly.
Speaker 6: Don't eat the entire thing. I would give you one
Speaker 6: thousand dollars.
Speaker 5: I swear to you right now.
Speaker 2: I can't believe you're just said dot.
Speaker 7: I ask you guys, I can eat a.
Speaker 2: Boe RuPaul's drag Race fans need to know our dragonflies edible. Apparently,
Speaker 2: have you heard anything about drag race and eating dragonflies?
Speaker 5: Uh no, but I'm here for it, and I will
Speaker 5: just say dragonflies are absolutely edible. If you were ever
Speaker 5: to eat an insect, that's the one that I would eat.
Speaker 5: I mean, I've eaten a lot of insects in my lifetime,
Speaker 5: but dragonflies are Their thorax is just pure mussel, right,
Speaker 5: So they actually don't have a lot of fat. They're
Speaker 5: like always flying right, burning their fat stores and their muscle,
Speaker 5: their thorax. The entire thing is just one, like just
Speaker 5: blocks of muscle. So they're high protein thing. If that's
Speaker 5: the like, if it was me and I was wanting
Speaker 5: to eat something, I would break the wings off. I
Speaker 5: would probably take the adumn off because I don't need that,
Speaker 5: and I would just eat the thorax and you would
Speaker 5: have a little protein snack.
Speaker 2: It's like shrimps, sort of kind of shrimpy, maybe a
Speaker 2: little bit if it's muscle.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 5: Maybe, I mean I often think of the insects tastes
Speaker 5: kind of nutty. I actually don't eat srim because I'm
Speaker 5: allergic to shrimp. So I maybe that's what shrimp tastes like.
Speaker 5: Maybe timp tastes like nuts. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I looked into this for us, and yes,
Speaker 2: you can eat eat dragonflies, but check the species first,
Speaker 2: try not to eat an endangered one. Now, as we
Speaker 2: discussed in our entomophagy Anthropology episode about eating bugs, the
Speaker 2: most humane way to kill them is to lower their temperature.
Speaker 2: You can put them in the freezer. And in general,
Speaker 2: people say eating some raw bugs should be fine, but
Speaker 2: if you can cook them, do that. And for more
Speaker 2: on how and why humans do eat dragonflies, you can
Speaker 2: see the pretty new twenty twenty four study Edible dragonflies
Speaker 2: and damsel flies order Odonata as Human Food, a comprehensive
Speaker 2: review which states that edible insects are rich in nutritional value,
Speaker 2: with protein, fat, carbohydrate, vitamins, and minerals at levels that
Speaker 2: meet human nutritional requirements, and that folks who have eaten
Speaker 2: dragonflies say they taste a lot like shellfish due to
Speaker 2: the external skeletons, while others describe the flavor as quote
Speaker 2: a meaty vegetable and a bit nutty.
Speaker 4: Especially when roasted.
Speaker 2: But the study does warrant that some of the same
Speaker 2: allergens in shellfish are present in other vertebrates like bugs,
Speaker 2: so if you're allergic to shellfish, be careful. There also
Speaker 2: heavy metal toxins from water sources could be present and accumulate,
Speaker 2: so if Odonata are to be eaten in big quantities,
Speaker 2: farming is the way to go, and again, cooking it
Speaker 2: better in case their specteria. I don't know, I'm not
Speaker 2: your doctor, but be smart about it. Don't just pluck
Speaker 2: one off a piece of fabric on a reality show
Speaker 2: and raw dog it for money straight down the gullet.
Speaker 2: Now I read one culinary message board that said, they are,
Speaker 2: in fact like a soft shell crab, pretty darn tasty,
Speaker 2: and if you ask me better for the planet, then
Speaker 2: a bunch of cleared rainforests filled with sad, farting cows.
Speaker 5: So you could and should eat them.
Speaker 2: And well we'll get to conservation in a second. But
Speaker 2: a few people, Guido Faery, you're and fred Berg laur
Speaker 2: Pemberton wanted to know, in Laurie's words, ornithopters in Dune?
Speaker 2: Could that be a real thing? There are helicopters that
Speaker 2: look like dragonflies in Dune. I'm sure if you've seen them,
Speaker 2: but you watch Dune and you're like, those are huge dragonflies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're bonkers.
Speaker 2: Do people send you so many articles and pictures of
Speaker 2: them when Dune movies come out?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Absolutely, yes, one yes. And there also was the
Speaker 5: name of a spacecraft that didn't look like a dragonfly,
Speaker 5: but it was named after dragonfly. And my mention's got
Speaker 5: all messed up because of all these dragonfly things, and
Speaker 5: I was like, oh my gosh, everyone's talking about dragonflies space.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I look this up. According to NASA, Dragonfly
Speaker 2: is this quad copter drone designed to explore the chemistry
Speaker 2: and the habitability of Saturn's moon Titan. And I'm thinking
Speaker 2: when they're building it, I hope they refer to it
Speaker 2: as a naiad because how cuy would that be? Like
Speaker 2: a little nymph. Also, if it's like it's odor Nata namesake,
Speaker 2: then it would be powered by mosquito larvae and worms,
Speaker 2: and if it's a baby, it could collect them by
Speaker 2: unhinging its hell mouth jaw, which dragonfly iads do They
Speaker 2: toss it out like a javelin. Well, it's still attached
Speaker 2: to their face, and then some of them have pincers
Speaker 2: that capture their fuel and then bring it back to
Speaker 2: their mouth. It's bonkers. It's what Odonata nymphs can do,
Speaker 2: and it is terrifying and inspiring, which brings us to
Speaker 2: a question about technology from patrons Ron Sam Jesse, Prawford,
Speaker 2: Club Jamie and Thomas Paine, who wanted to know are
Speaker 2: dragonfly is a model for future human flight?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean humans have for a long time taken inspiration
Speaker 5: by dragonfly flight. You know, dragonflies do a lot of
Speaker 5: the things that we want to do when we try
Speaker 5: and design aircraft that are you know, stealthy or energetically inexpensive, right,
Speaker 5: you know, ratio long and thin wings are really good
Speaker 5: for long distance flight and for fast flight. The turning
Speaker 5: radius is affected by the shape and camber and pitch
Speaker 5: and yaw, all the things that we have to worry
Speaker 5: about when we think about flight. Dragonflies have been you know,
Speaker 5: presumably having selection act on that for millions of years,
Speaker 5: hundreds of millions of years. So I think humans have
Speaker 5: looked to dragonfly flight quite a lot. But then certainly
Speaker 5: it's inspiration for sci fi. I mean, it's hard to
Speaker 5: imagine a better kind of model for something that is
Speaker 5: very good at targeted flight. They do insant interception style predation,
Speaker 5: so they're able to kind of maneuver very well in
Speaker 5: and amongst vegetation. They're able to catch prey very quickly.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's kind of an ideal fire.
Speaker 2: And speaking of that, gnomes loarmer. How does their flying work?
Speaker 2: And can they just hover? So many people.
Speaker 5: Wanted to know.
Speaker 2: First time question asker Sarah Philo wanted to know why
Speaker 2: do they fly like that? So chaotic and unpredictable? It
Speaker 2: seems like they're turned so fast and I blink and
Speaker 2: then they're gone. A bunch of you wanted to know this,
Speaker 2: and I will say, your name's very swiftly. Cuddlecuttle, Isabelle
Speaker 2: the Clerk, Rachel gj Wyatt, Olivia Callas, launchingly fully, Pimenaz,
Speaker 2: Nathan Marion, Collina Anderson Theta and Odysseus floor Borerwinkle, and
Speaker 2: Laurie Pemberton, who asked what's the top speed of dragonfly
Speaker 2: can reach? Oliver call Us want to know how many
Speaker 2: times a minute do they beat their wings?
Speaker 4: Do we know?
Speaker 2: Are they like near hummingbirds in terms of how fast
Speaker 2: they beat the wings? But yeah, how what's going on
Speaker 2: with the flying?
Speaker 5: So it really depends on the texam. So some things
Speaker 5: fly very high up in the air column, they fly
Speaker 5: very fast. There's like reports of darners that can fly
Speaker 5: thirty miles an hour, for example, And then there are
Speaker 5: other things that barely flutter, you know, that never leave
Speaker 5: the pond from which they emerge, and we tend to
Speaker 5: think of them as being quite poor fliers. People tend
Speaker 5: to think of damsel flies as being kind of poor
Speaker 5: fliers than dragonflies. Although there are things like that megalaprepis
Speaker 5: that big giant helicopter damsel fly, the one that lays
Speaker 5: its sikes in tree holes and it flies. I've seen
Speaker 5: it fly. It's really hard to catch. I mean it
Speaker 5: looks like it's just barely there when you try and
Speaker 5: catch it. Man, it is really very very difficult. Better
Speaker 5: luck next time. Presumably, like the ancestor to dragonflies, to
Speaker 5: mother and dragonflies, was probably not a very good flyer,
Speaker 5: we think, just based on its wing shape, size and
Speaker 5: the wing venation patterns that we see. But then over
Speaker 5: time dragonfly flight got quite good, and we think that
Speaker 5: some of the selection probably was because initially there was
Speaker 5: nothing in the sky except for ordinate light things, right,
Speaker 5: But as the sky started to fill up with species
Speaker 5: and there was like birds and frogs and terosaurs and
Speaker 5: things like that, there would have been selection on them
Speaker 5: to be able to maneuver very well, and there would
Speaker 5: have also been selection to kind of have optimized you know,
Speaker 5: speed and performance and so part of what we see
Speaker 5: when you look at the dragonfly wing, the wing venation
Speaker 5: is very noticeable, right, something that people notice. Tiffany made
Speaker 5: those Tiffany lamps based on dragonfly wings, right. But the
Speaker 5: more dense. The wing veins are the stiffer the wing is,
Speaker 5: and the spars or the wing veins are the more
Speaker 5: bendy it is. But there's also a bunch of this
Speaker 5: tissue called resonant, which is a really spongy tissue that
Speaker 5: makes it kind of has elastic properties. There's small spines
Speaker 5: and hairs that kind of are different parts of the
Speaker 5: wings to add more rigidity or less rigidity. There's this
Speaker 5: thing called the terra stigma, which is this small little
Speaker 5: dot of color tip for the wing, which we think
Speaker 5: xt to kind of stabilize the main cord of the
Speaker 5: wing against vibrations during flight. It's kind of like a
Speaker 5: little counter leaper, like a little weight at the tip
Speaker 5: of the wing.
Speaker 2: So that's what those dragonfly dots are for. And doctor
Speaker 2: Ware says that they have two sets of wings, one
Speaker 2: in front on the back of the fore wing and
Speaker 2: once the hindwing, and how wind passes over the fore
Speaker 2: wing depending on its angle effects also obviously how the
Speaker 2: air moves over the hindwing, which gives them such control
Speaker 2: and that allows them to glide, to fly backwards, and
Speaker 2: to attain hunting speeds up to thirty five miles per
Speaker 2: hour or fifty five kilometers an hour. You were so lucky,
Speaker 2: you're too big for them.
Speaker 5: So that all of that has been optimized by natural
Speaker 5: selection really to kind of move air in a certain
Speaker 5: way to kind of maintain lifts and decrease drag and
Speaker 5: energy expenditure.
Speaker 2: Patrons, Susan Singley, Chris liss Ashton, Lexi Cable, Patricia Evans Page,
Speaker 2: Floor Boerwinkle, Lina Carpenter, and Jenny Vievbertron had evolutionary inquiries.
Speaker 2: People are talking about movies where the dinosaurs hanging out
Speaker 2: with like dragon sized dragonflies. True.
Speaker 4: False.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean everyone wants to talk about dinosaurs being
Speaker 5: around for a long time, but they're like a blit
Speaker 5: compared to dragon vies and Namavis souse, dragon baz dammeoplis
Speaker 5: are very old. Right, So these griffin flies were flying
Speaker 5: in the carboniferous, so three hundred and fifty million years ago,
Speaker 5: so this is before t rex and all these things
Speaker 5: that you see with dragonflies flying on. There certainly were
Speaker 5: dragonflies for as long as there were dinosaurs, there were dragonflies,
Speaker 5: with a couple of exceptions. For modern dragonflies, if we
Speaker 5: date them to be around two hundred and twenty five,
Speaker 5: two hundred and thirty million years old, there were some
Speaker 5: small little we dinosaur proto dinosaurs that were kind of
Speaker 5: coming up them. But in general, like the carboniferous flying
Speaker 5: griffin flies would have been around, and they're like each
Speaker 5: wing was about thirty seven centimeters, so maybe seventy centimeters
Speaker 5: about two feet wide, you know, so they're there, I
Speaker 5: would I don't. I mean, that probably would look like
Speaker 5: a dragon when it was in the and that's pretty big,
Speaker 5: but it's not the size of a Komodo dragon, certainly not.
Speaker 5: But they were definitely around. As you see that kind
Speaker 5: of rise of reptiles, right, the age of reptiles, as
Speaker 5: that was kind of starting to happen, they would have
Speaker 5: already been these odinates or proto odinates in the sky.
Speaker 4: What sound, what sound do you think that would make?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, so the sound of dragonfly wings is
Speaker 5: so interesting, right, And there actually are these kind of
Speaker 5: like spines and ridges on the what they call the
Speaker 5: leading edge of the wing that some people have said
Speaker 5: for Pentalatha vessence, this wandering glider. Actually some of those
Speaker 5: ridges and spines are to decrease the amount of sound
Speaker 5: that they make, so that way they can avoid being
Speaker 5: heard by predators and sneak up on their prey more easily.
Speaker 5: But dragonfly wings aren't like if you I used to
Speaker 5: have one on my desk actually, but you can if
Speaker 5: you ruffle them. They definitely make a noise, most definitely,
Speaker 5: But I think they would be selected to try and
Speaker 5: make as little sound as possible, right if they're going
Speaker 5: about their business.
Speaker 2: A few patrons, including Cole, the Evans, Karra Young, Devin,
Speaker 2: and Curtis to a Kahashi who wanted to know, in
Speaker 2: Curtis's words, where on the food chain are they? Who
Speaker 2: eats them?
Speaker 4: Do bats eat them?
Speaker 2: Birds eat them? Apparently they're delicious, right, it couldn't be delicious.
Speaker 5: Bats eat them, birds eat them, lizards eat them, frogs
Speaker 5: eat them, fish eat them, mammals eat them. There's a
Speaker 5: lot we eat them. Humans eat them, like not just me,
Speaker 5: but like many many cultures of people that eat insects
Speaker 5: eat dragonflies. So yeah, I think they're really like a
Speaker 5: very common good source of protein.
Speaker 2: This is a very informed question from rich Thomas Simpson said,
Speaker 2: if we puny humans have three options in our eyes RGB,
Speaker 2: do we have any idea what the dragonflies have that
Speaker 2: a whopping thirty different visual options. Use them for seems
Speaker 2: like overkill Aside from seeing a wider spectrum, what more
Speaker 2: are they getting? Are they seeing sounds? Can they see
Speaker 2: the future? Can they see who've used their tiktoks? What's
Speaker 2: going on? Okay, So just a quick side note. An
Speaker 2: option is a protein that binds to light reactive receptors,
Speaker 2: which underlie vission. Humans have three cone type cells that
Speaker 2: help us see color, and rod cells help us detect light.
Speaker 2: And for more on this and a lot of detail,
Speaker 2: we have a whole ophthalmology episode. That's great, it's all
Speaker 2: about eyes. But yeah, back to dragonflies. Do they have
Speaker 2: ten times the opsins that we do?
Speaker 5: So they have a lot of options, and there's been
Speaker 5: a lot of expansions in kind of like whole families
Speaker 5: of a whole different kinds of options. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 5: know that it's overkilled because there is a lot of
Speaker 5: color and they're using my guy, they're using this to communicate, right,
Speaker 5: so males are communicating with males and males are communicating
Speaker 5: with females. They're doing it for species recognition. I mean,
Speaker 5: there's a lot of reasons why selection would have maybe
Speaker 5: acted on this, and we do see site variation in
Speaker 5: the opsins, for example, and the things that fly at
Speaker 5: night brits of the things that are diurnal. So I
Speaker 5: think that if you look across the amount of color
Speaker 5: that you see and ordinates, it's huge. And the families
Speaker 5: that have the most range of color are also the
Speaker 5: families that are the most species rich. And Rea Foods
Speaker 5: Seth Bibe. There's a few labs that have worked especially
Speaker 5: like in a lot of detail on the options, and
Speaker 5: I think what the conclusion is is that colors like
Speaker 5: a really important part of the story of the evolution
Speaker 5: of odinates, and so we of course we might expect
Speaker 5: that their options are part of that story too.
Speaker 2: What about their brains of a few people want to know, Yes,
Speaker 2: like Flora Boerwinkled, Dave canon tany magic fingers wanted to
Speaker 2: know what's their brain situation?
Speaker 4: Like in Flora's words, Well.
Speaker 5: I mean they I guess they can do a lot
Speaker 5: with what they have. So let's say mentioned they're able
Speaker 5: to do interception style predation, which is pretty remarkable. You know,
Speaker 5: that's what lions do, and they're able to do that
Speaker 5: with a relatively small number of descending into neurons.
Speaker 2: So this is when a predator tracks its prey and
Speaker 2: guesses where it's going to go next, and then heads
Speaker 2: that way to intercept it and catch it. So they're
Speaker 2: doing some insect physics and math up there.
Speaker 5: But they have like optic lobes. They have a mushroom body,
Speaker 5: which is where we think there's a lot of memory
Speaker 5: where the memory storage happens in odinates. But like all insects,
Speaker 5: they basically have kind of it's more like clusters of ganglia,
Speaker 5: you know, that we're working with. We're not talking about
Speaker 5: a centralized brain per se. I mean they do have
Speaker 5: a tintorum, they do have in their head. They do
Speaker 5: have these big major lobes, and they do have this
Speaker 5: mushroom body and nerves that descend from the head. But
Speaker 5: I wouldn't think of it like a mammal brain. Just
Speaker 5: think of it more like near these clusters of ganglia
Speaker 5: that work together for sensory input.
Speaker 2: So them's got brains, they got small once they got brains.
Speaker 8: Though.
Speaker 2: Patron Kili Shabaz submitted an audio question via Patreon.
Speaker 3: Hi Elie Kili Chabz, this may be my favorite ology ever.
Speaker 3: Wondering why there are so many color morphs of different
Speaker 3: species makes it really hard to pick out the right
Speaker 3: one on a naturalist.
Speaker 2: Thanks, Do you have any tips for people who are
Speaker 2: out dragonfly spotting and how to identify different dragon flies.
Speaker 5: That's a tough fun for sure, so we do. I mean,
Speaker 5: there are a lot of good field guides out there,
Speaker 5: so give like props to Nothing beats a book, you know,
Speaker 5: having a book in your hand, because they could do
Speaker 5: kind of break down the color plus wing venation or
Speaker 5: head or other features that you should look for, because
Speaker 5: sometimes color can be misleading. Like I mentioned, the eastern
Speaker 5: pond hawk is green, except for when it's not. When
Speaker 5: it's a male that's old, it's blue. You know. There
Speaker 5: are also some damsel flies where there's males that are
Speaker 5: a certain color, there's females that are a certain color,
Speaker 5: and then there's females that kind of change their color
Speaker 5: to look like males to avoid sexual harassment.
Speaker 2: Literally, like in drag we're like traveling solo wearing a
Speaker 2: full glue on beard. Just leave me alone. And you
Speaker 2: know what else is fun? The paper faking death to
Speaker 2: avoid male coercion Extreme sexual conflict resolution in a dragonfly,
Speaker 2: which describes the Moorland hawker dragonfly who deposits her eggs,
Speaker 2: flies away and if trailed by a male, she crashes
Speaker 2: dramatic into vegetation. She lies motionless upside down for as
Speaker 2: long as it takes, and then when the coast is clear,
Speaker 2: she gets on her merry way. She's like later sucker.
Speaker 5: So those can make it very complicated, so for damsel flies.
Speaker 5: For that reason, for those of us like myself who
Speaker 5: are more settying dragonflies, I often think, oh geez, it's
Speaker 5: just a lot of small blue things for damsel flies,
Speaker 5: because that's a lot of what they are, like a
Speaker 5: lot of small blue things that are kind of hard
Speaker 5: to tell apart. Often what you want to look for
Speaker 5: for damsel flies, for species or even sometimes the genera
Speaker 5: is you want to look at the anal what they
Speaker 5: call the anal appendages of these class birds that males use,
Speaker 5: and you need to use have a hand lens or
Speaker 5: like a jeweler's loop that you can look at them,
Speaker 5: and the shape of them are very distinctive, right, so
Speaker 5: those can be diagnostic. But sometimes I would say it's
Speaker 5: very hard to take a picture of that for I naturalists,
Speaker 5: you know what I mean. And so if you're using
Speaker 5: aig naturalists only, you would miss those characters, and those
Speaker 5: characters will probably really help you get to the species
Speaker 5: id or so I would say, if you can get
Speaker 5: like a small magnu find glass or something to take
Speaker 5: with you when you're looking at it, and look at
Speaker 5: the bum, look at the tail end, you know, look
Speaker 5: at the tip of the abdomen. That will allow you
Speaker 5: to kind of look at the overall shape. Sometimes they're
Speaker 5: not sometimes they're hooked. Sometimes there's a little tooth on
Speaker 5: the anal appendages, and those things are really important diagnostic characters.
Speaker 2: So damsel flies, you got to really get up in there.
Speaker 2: Dragonflies is a little more casual for dragonflies.
Speaker 5: Often you can look at the wing venation and you
Speaker 5: don't need to do anything fancy, you know, just hold
Speaker 5: the dragonfly in your hand and look at the eye,
Speaker 5: hold them by the wings, and then just look at
Speaker 5: the wing venation. And all skimmers have a shape that
Speaker 5: looks like a foot in their wings, so the wing
Speaker 5: venation actually informs the shape of like a little knee,
Speaker 5: a shin, a toe, a heel, you know, and then
Speaker 5: a calf. So you kind of get used to the
Speaker 5: patterns of things so that when in doubt with the color,
Speaker 5: that can kind of be your backup.
Speaker 4: Nice.
Speaker 2: So get into that venation, ve nations where it's at.
Speaker 4: Don't get a tattoo with the wrong venation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, last question from listeners, and I'm glad they asked
Speaker 2: this because same same Chelsea Awick. A lot of people,
Speaker 2: by the way, just said they're very stoked about this.
Speaker 2: Emmy the Stranger said, dragonflies or fairies prove me wrong.
Speaker 2: Alley Edith wanted to know they see magic? Are they magic?
Speaker 2: Emily Staffer said, when I was little, I was told
Speaker 2: it's good luck when lands on you. That's definitely true, right.
Speaker 2: Some people asked Amanda loves Kurt and Chelsea Wilke also
Speaker 2: asked about people passing away. Amanda says, I've often heard
Speaker 2: it said that dragonflizer science from loved ones who have
Speaker 2: passed on. Where did the symbolism come from? And I
Speaker 2: thought this is a great question from Kate. First time
Speaker 2: question asker said, is there any lure around them that
Speaker 2: might be linked to some behavior or a historic event?
Speaker 2: It feels like they have symbolic meaning across cultures. They
Speaker 2: do seem a little magical, and Kate is a first
Speaker 2: time question asker and a biology student in Miami University's
Speaker 2: Project Dragonfly Program.
Speaker 5: Odentatologists, I can't wait to see you at the next
Speaker 5: dragon Pie Society or World Dragonfly meeting. Well, this is
Speaker 5: what I would say is that for as long as there,
Speaker 5: I mean, humans were a very short footnote in the
Speaker 5: story of dragonflies, right, So we've never had been in
Speaker 5: a world where there wasn't dragonflies, right, So humans as
Speaker 5: such have evolved with dragonflies always present. So depending on
Speaker 5: which part of the world you're in, there's a lot
Speaker 5: of cultural significance for dragonflies. Sometimes there's negative connotations, sometimes positive,
Speaker 5: and it really varies with kind of culture. My grandmother
Speaker 5: is British, she's from Yorkshire, so she taught me that
Speaker 5: if you fall asleep next to the water Darner's those asianids,
Speaker 5: that they would sew your lip shut.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: That does not happen. They do not do that. But
Speaker 5: it's because people saw the overpositor and they thought it
Speaker 5: was like a darning needle, right, So that I would
Speaker 5: count that as a negative association, right. But then I
Speaker 5: have heard from lots of people that they feel like
Speaker 5: they're you know, a good sign that it's a sign
Speaker 5: of a loved one who's passed away. I have heard
Speaker 5: that before, and.
Speaker 2: For a deep dive you could always see the delightful
Speaker 2: study insect myths an interdisciplinary approach fostering active learning in
Speaker 2: the journal American Entomologist, which cites the Zuni tribe of
Speaker 2: what is now New Mexico as the origin of the
Speaker 2: folklore that dragonflies are a messenger between God and humans.
Speaker 2: But the DNA people often called or once called the Navajo,
Speaker 2: had associations with dragonflies, signifying balance in life. Like most things,
Speaker 2: especially bugs, their value depends on who you ask.
Speaker 5: Really, in some cultures they're considered to be very good luck.
Speaker 5: In other cultures, there's a story in East Asia where
Speaker 5: if they get caught in your hair that it's a
Speaker 5: sign that mental illness is coming. That would be like
Speaker 5: an example of a negative one. But then there's examples
Speaker 5: from like ancient Japanese texts of an emperor that was
Speaker 5: bit by a horse fly, and a dragonfly came and
Speaker 5: ate the horse fly, because they do eat horseflies, and
Speaker 5: so one of the names for the islands of Japan
Speaker 5: was island of dragonflies, and some of the Samurai armature
Speaker 5: actually had on their helmets had dragonflies on them and
Speaker 5: had dragonflies kind of etched in some of the armor
Speaker 5: that they wore. Because they were considered incredible predators and
Speaker 5: really good successful hunters, right, that would be a positive connotation.
Speaker 5: So I feel like it really varies probably through space
Speaker 5: and time. Right, what people have thought about dragonflies. I
Speaker 5: like to think that they're good luck. I mean, at
Speaker 5: the very least, there can be good harbingers of what's
Speaker 5: happening in the environment. Right. So, like there's a red
Speaker 5: one that comes around in North America and like the autumn,
Speaker 5: and it's called simpetrum petra because it perches off and
Speaker 5: on rocks and things like that. And if you see that,
Speaker 5: you know autumn is coming. Right, There's Annextudius is one
Speaker 5: of the first ones to fly. If you see it,
Speaker 5: you know spring is here.
Speaker 4: Ah.
Speaker 5: So you can kind of use those as good markers.
Speaker 5: So you didn't know you weren't able to tell the
Speaker 5: seasons any other way. You could use dragonflies for sure.
Speaker 5: Plus you know that there's fresh water nearby. If you
Speaker 5: see dragonflies and damselflies, probably there's water pretty close by
Speaker 5: and it might very well be clean. With the astis
Speaker 5: that there are some dragonflies and damselflieser are not very
Speaker 5: picky and they'll be in swill. But there's a lot
Speaker 5: that really like fresh water that is clean and that
Speaker 5: could be a good sign too.
Speaker 2: And do dragonflies bite? You mentioned horsefly biting? Do dragonflies?
Speaker 4: Do they bite people?
Speaker 2: Patrons? Chuck, Miriam Han the Bee, heather Crane, Flora and
Speaker 2: the Fawn and Amanda loves Kurt needed to know this,
Speaker 2: and the ren you know had the statement, I just
Speaker 2: came here to say that dragonfly naiads plague my nightmares.
Speaker 2: And when I was a kid, I saw one eating
Speaker 2: a pollywog, so no offense, but what the fuck? Hashtag
Speaker 2: ugly baby mish. The fish also told the tale that
Speaker 2: when I was like ten at summer camp, this dragonfly
Speaker 2: made its way over to us and one of the
Speaker 2: kids flipped out. She was so scared, which only made
Speaker 2: the dragonfly more attracted to our Why why are people
Speaker 2: afraid of them? And Sophie asked, am I right to
Speaker 2: be afraid of them? I feel like they bite, but
Speaker 2: I think I'm wrong they don't.
Speaker 5: I mean if you pick up a drag. If I
Speaker 5: picked up a dragonfly and held it close to me,
Speaker 5: then it will use its mouth parts and try and
Speaker 5: like be like what's going on? And sometimes it feels
Speaker 5: like a but it's not because it's trying to bite
Speaker 5: me because it can't eat me, and it won't try
Speaker 5: and eat me. Its mouth parts kind of fit together
Speaker 5: and then the mandibles are on the inside and it
Speaker 5: would be very ineffective to try and eat me. You
Speaker 5: don't want this. But sometimes they'll do that just to
Speaker 5: try and get away, right, And so some people will say, oh,
Speaker 5: I've mispit by a dragonfly, and I say, what were
Speaker 5: you doing? So well I picked it up. I'm like, well,
Speaker 5: then there you go. It's just trying to get away, right.
Speaker 5: So I don't think that counts. I mean, they don't
Speaker 5: come to you like, oh, I want to try and
Speaker 5: bite that human. They would never do that. It would
Speaker 5: be only if you happened to pick it up and
Speaker 5: you were holding it and it was getting perturbed. Then
Speaker 5: they'll try and like.
Speaker 4: Ah, like let me go. And I said, I would
Speaker 4: get to this.
Speaker 2: But how are we doing? How are they doing? Matt
Speaker 2: Takata wants to know how can we protect them? Bonnie
Speaker 2: Rutherford want to know if mosquito dunks harm dragonfly and
Speaker 2: damselfly larvae in essentially like how are they doing?
Speaker 5: So like all insects, we think that they're probably facing
Speaker 5: into insects decline, right, and the insect decline that we're
Speaker 5: seeing is like higher rate than we've ever seen in
Speaker 5: the history that humans have been keeping records. So we
Speaker 5: should be if you like wondering, how concerned should you be?
Speaker 5: I would say gravely, incredibly intensely concerned.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 5: What we don't know is whether or not the pattern
Speaker 5: is the same in the Arctic, or in the temperate regions,
Speaker 5: or in the traffic unions for dragonflies and amplifies. There
Speaker 5: was some early reports that maybe because we actually had
Speaker 5: done an okay job putting regulations for fresh water in
Speaker 5: some parts of the world, that maybe they actually were
Speaker 5: doing better now than they were in the seventies, for example.
Speaker 5: But whether or not that means they're doing as well
Speaker 5: as they were in nineteen hundred or pre industrial revolution,
Speaker 5: probably not. What we know is that populations are changing
Speaker 5: in terms of their geographic distribution. Things that used to
Speaker 5: only be found, For example, annex and Parada was found
Speaker 5: in southern Europe northern Africa, and now it's established in Sweden,
Speaker 5: so they're expanding their ranges. What that means for the
Speaker 5: Texa in the Arctic, whether they're going to be out competed,
Speaker 5: we don't know. Know that they need fresh water, right,
Speaker 5: So as you lose fresh water, that's a risk of
Speaker 5: course for dragonflies and nempliphus because they cannot breed in
Speaker 5: salt water. They need fresh water. And as we pollute,
Speaker 5: you know, we continue to pollute and change in divert water.
Speaker 5: That's a big part of what humans do. We're very
Speaker 5: we're we seem to not realize that we have very
Speaker 5: very little fresh water on this earth, and all life
Speaker 5: depends on it, Like every single living thing depends on
Speaker 5: fresh water, and we have almost none of it. Almost
Speaker 5: none of it's fresh, Almost all of it is salt. Right,
Speaker 5: So we really need this precious like resource, and the
Speaker 5: dragonflies and damsifies really need this precious resource. But we
Speaker 5: treat it like it's renewable, like there's an unlimited amount,
Speaker 5: and there really is not. So that's something to say, Yeah,
Speaker 5: you should probably be very worried. We and they need
Speaker 5: our help, just like all insects need our health, but
Speaker 5: freshwater insects in particular, because without fresh water, they're not
Speaker 5: able to breathe, right, that's it. Population over as you
Speaker 5: know people would say, so building freshwater sources can be important.
Speaker 5: You know, having a water feature in your yard can
Speaker 5: be important. And I don't mean like a tub that
Speaker 5: breeds a bunch of mosquitoes that only one or two
Speaker 5: dragonflies can be in, because that's not really what we're
Speaker 5: looking for, but like an actual like a pond, like
Speaker 5: people can build like water features of little ponds in
Speaker 5: their yard that can be really helpful. Voting for people
Speaker 5: who care about fresh water, whether even your town council.
Speaker 5: I mean often people think that it's a national issue
Speaker 5: and not a local issue. It's absolutely a local issue.
Speaker 5: You probably have fresh water within a few blocks of
Speaker 5: where you live, whether you live in an urban sitting
Speaker 5: or in a real setting, and so voting for people
Speaker 5: who are going to protect that fresh water is really important.
Speaker 5: That has a really big impact. And I think that
Speaker 5: in general, just getting people to realize that freshwater insects
Speaker 5: are important food for everything, right, for birds, for fish,
Speaker 5: for frogs. We kind of really need them more than
Speaker 5: I think people realize.
Speaker 2: What's the hardest thing about being a dragonfly expert.
Speaker 5: That's a good question. I don't think there's much that's
Speaker 5: hard about it. It's kind of a blessed life. And
Speaker 5: if anybody complains about this job, I promise you probably
Speaker 5: they go to bed with a smile on their face
Speaker 5: and they're just doing it performatively because academics feel like
Speaker 5: they have to complain. There's not a lot of bad
Speaker 5: things being an idonatologist, you know. I mean, you get
Speaker 5: to be outside, it's a hot day, you're near fresh water,
Speaker 5: which means you're guaranteed to go for a swim. The
Speaker 5: dragonfly community has this thing where we often go for
Speaker 5: ininget ice cream after you do collecting. It's like a
Speaker 5: thing that dragon white people do, so it's usually almost
Speaker 5: always ice cream. There's a lot of cool questions that
Speaker 5: are not yet to be answered. The live room for discovery,
Speaker 5: the collaboration between people, whether you're from Nigeria or Guyana,
Speaker 5: or Japan or or Northern Canada. Like, there's room for
Speaker 5: collaboration with everybody, and people I think are really good
Speaker 5: team builders in this business. Compared to other insect groups
Speaker 5: that I've worked on where it was very competitive, dragonflies,
Speaker 5: it does not seem like that. So if so when
Speaker 5: I told me this was a tough job, I would
Speaker 5: probably be like, really cut less, real talk, be honest
Speaker 5: with me, and then they, i'm sure would be like, yeah,
Speaker 5: you're right, this is a pretty good job.
Speaker 2: Do you have a favorite aspect of it? Do you
Speaker 2: love like field work like early morning field work days,
Speaker 2: or do you love like getting back and getting data crunch,
Speaker 2: Like is there a heart that you love the most?
Speaker 5: I think, I mean, I really do like it all.
Speaker 5: I really love doing field work. I love being out
Speaker 5: at freshwater. I mean that was kind of what got
Speaker 5: me interested in it any ways, was just being near
Speaker 5: the lake all the time, seeing dragonflies land And that
Speaker 5: part is still just like what field work is. But
Speaker 5: sometimes it's very cold, like do we did the We
Speaker 5: were in the Arctic last October drilling, you know, cutting
Speaker 5: holes in the ice at minus you know, thirty degrees
Speaker 5: or something like that, And there were times when it
Speaker 5: didn't feel as fun, but it was still fun, you
Speaker 5: know what I mean, Like even like the base level
Speaker 5: of like, oh, I'm not sure, it's still like stratospheres
Speaker 5: above any job I've ever had in terms of enjoyment,
Speaker 5: But even like aligning DNA is fun looking at their
Speaker 5: genitals under the microscope was fun. Making the phylogeny is fun.
Speaker 5: Working with collaborators, you know, is fun. So I think
Speaker 5: the whole, the whole shebang, it's a pretty great job.
Speaker 5: I feel so lucky that I get to do it.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for talking to me about dragonflies,
Speaker 2: which are so long. I'm so excited to.
Speaker 5: Talk to you. Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 2: So ask some daring questions to delightful dragonfly experts, because
Speaker 2: look at all we learned. And for more on doctor
Speaker 2: Jessica where please see her socials in the show notes
Speaker 2: and follow her. Tell her this She's awesome. And next
Speaker 2: time you see a dragonfly, tell hey, I know about you.
Speaker 2: I know about your butt and your eyes.
Speaker 4: I like you.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening. We're at Ologies on Instagram and
Speaker 2: x I'm at ali Ward on both. We have swear
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Speaker 2: Smologies at the link in the show notes or wherever
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Speaker 2: you Aveline Malik for making our professional transcripts. Thanks to
Speaker 2: Kelly Dwyer for making the website. Noel Dilworth is our
Speaker 2: lovely scheduling producer and worked for years to schedule lists.
Speaker 2: Susan Hale is a great friend and managing director of Ologies.
Speaker 2: Chafey is an editor, always a very cheery help and
Speaker 2: lead editor with astounding maneuverability. Herself is Mercedes Maitland of
Speaker 2: Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music And if
Speaker 2: you stick around to the end of the episode, I
Speaker 2: tell you secret today. It's that it's five nine pm
Speaker 2: on November fifth. That's right, I record these leg at
Speaker 2: the last minute. And it's election night in America. I'm
Speaker 2: in pajamas, I have not showered, I do not smell good.
Speaker 2: And tomorrow's my frigging birthday, and so tonight a few
Speaker 2: friends are coming by to watch the election results and
Speaker 2: have pizza. I'm not doing great. Tuesdays are already a
Speaker 2: sprint to the finish. Birthdays are weird because everyone's nice
Speaker 2: to you and you're like.
Speaker 4: Ah, it's too much.
Speaker 2: And election days are just white knuckle shit shows. And
Speaker 2: my intestines people are oppressol. My hands are like a
Speaker 2: virgin on a homecoming date. I'm just sending this out saying,
Speaker 2: hey man, let's spend time and space with our minds
Speaker 2: and let's hope for the best.
Speaker 5: America.
Speaker 2: I believe in you get it together, do better from
Speaker 2: here on out on a lot of things. So love y'all. Okay,
Speaker 2: off to shower, Bye.
Speaker 8: Bye, pacadermatology, homology or doo zoology, lithology, zeronology, meteorology, pedatology, ethnology, seriology, elinology.
Speaker 5: It's almost like you're the dragonfly.