Random Corner

•If dragonflies remind you of some kind of ancient insect, it’s because they have been around for 350 million years. The prehistoric insect belongs to the Odonata family, along with their “cousins” the damselfly. How do you tell them apart? Dragonflies have four wings, damselflies have two.

•The ancestors of dragonflies are called meganisoptera, also referred to as griffinflies. These long-extinct relations to the dragonfly lived from 323 million to 250 million years B.C.E., during the Paleozoic era. One species of griffinfly is called the megatypus, which had a wingspan of about 28 inches.

•There are more than 3,000 known dragonfly species living on nearly every continent of the world.

•Dragonfly larvae live underwater. The biological term for invertebrate insects during the stage in which they go through the process of metamorphosis is referred to as a nymph. Adult dragonflies lay their eggs in the tissue of aquatic plants or on the surface of the water. After hatching from their eggs, nymphs spend several years underwater, feeding on other invertebrates, tadpoles and even small fish.

•Dragonflies can fly any direction, having the ability to control each of their four wings independently. This agility coupled with being able to reach speeds up to 34 miles per hour makes dragonflies top-notch predators, living almost exclusively on a carnivorous diet of mosquitoes, flies, moths and other dragonflies.

•Dragonflies have a 95% success ratio when they choose to go after a prey. This is because they don’t simply hunt down the insect, but track its movement and calculate not only the prey’s speed, but what direction and how far away it is. Then, in the microseconds it takes to adjust, the dragonfly zooms off to where their prey is going to be — not where it is — to catch it.