#ancientinsect

dragonfly in amber

A dragonfly is a symbol of change, transformation and self-realization. Since dragonflies eat mosquitoes and other insects, they help gardeners and outdoor enthusiasts. This also helps the environment, because it allows humans to reduce the use of pesticides to kill these insects.And on certain months of the year, the air would be full of dragonflies in the morning, all part of a secret dance, whose music we could not hear. Those months are now here & the air is full of dragonflies. Scientists have recently learnt that dragonflies migrate huge distances & even over the oceans. And they carry an entire ecosystem on their diaphanous wings. Birds chase dragonflies over the seas.Over the huge expanse of ocean water, where food would be scarce for a tired bird migrating thousands of kilometres, it is expected that the falcons eat dragonflies. That dragonfly that lives near you thus eats disease-carriers and provides food for birds, doing more in its lifetime than we would ever give it credit for.

Dragonflies and damselflies, like cockroaches, are two of the oldest insect groups. During prehistoric times, they were as big as hawks. You can find Odonate fossils from Kansas to Siberia. These fascinating creatures had wingspans of almost 30 inches and were the largest insects to ever live. They can be found all over the world except Artic and Antartica. An adult damselfly has a long slender body, which is green, blue, red, yellow, black, or brown and often brightly colored. The color of some species will change with a variety of environments, fading from bright blue to dull purple responding to cool temperatures or light. Damselflies are extremely beautiful, beneficial predators because they help control populations of harmful insects. Adults consume large quantities of other insects such as flies, mosquitoes and moths and some eat beetles and caterpillars. One way to conserve them is by avoiding indiscriminate use of pesticides. Damselflies are also a very important group of insects in stream and pond ecosystems. They are often used as an indicator of weather water is clean or polluted. The quality of the environment can be monitored by damselflies as their presence is strongly affected by different factors such as water flow, pollution and vegetation. The destruction and alteration of freshwater habitats are the greatest threats to damselfly species worldwide. Without clean water damselflies are unable to breed. An alteration of habitats through climate change may also pose a threat to damselfly populations in the future.

Dragonflies were some of the first winged insects to evolve, some 300 million years ago. Modern dragonflies have wingspans of only two to five inches, but fossil dragonflies theorize that high oxygen levels during the Paleozoic era allowed dragonflies to grow  up to two feet. Dragonflies are expert fliers. They can fly straight up and down, hover like a helicopter and even mate mid-air. If they can't fly, they'll starve because they only eat prey they catch while flying.  Dragonflies, which eat insects as adults, are a great control on the mosquito population. A single dragonfly can eat 30 to hundreds of mosquitoes per day. A dragonfly called the globe wanderer has the longest migration of any insect's 11,000 miles back and forth across the Indian Ocean.

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