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Episode: Odonatology (DRAGONFLIES) with Jessica Ware

Author: Alie Ward
Duration: 01:14:10

Episode Shownotes

They’re acrobatic fliers with long bodies and veined wings and their babies breathe through their butts: dragonflies. Let’s get into the difference between a damselfly and dragonfly, how fast they dart around, how big they were in the age of the dinosaurs, sci-fi aviation inspiration, mating choreography, attracting them to

your yard (maybe to eat them) and lots more with scholar, American Museum of Natural History curator, and dragonfly expert: Dr. Jessica Ware.Visit Dr. Ware’s website and follow her on Google Scholar, Instagram and XBuy Jessica’s children’s book, Bugs (A Day in the Life): What Do Bees, Ants, and Dragonflies Get up to All Day?, on Amazon or Bookshop.orgA donation went to the World Dragonfly AssociationMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Entomology (INSECTS), Lepidopterology (BUTTERFLIES), Cicadology (CICADAS), Sparklebuttology (FIREFLIES), Dipterology (FLIES), Entomophagy Anthropology (EATING BUGS), Plumology (FEATHERS), Melaninology (SKIN/HAIR PIGMENT), Ophthalmology (EYES)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow @Ologies on Instagram and XFollow @AlieWard on Instagram and XEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jacob ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Summary

In this episode of "Ologies with Alie Ward," Dr. Jessica Ware discusses dragonflies, their characteristics, and life cycles, comparing them to damselflies. They explore their ecological roles, unique mating behaviors, and the fascinating details of their development. The episode also covers conservation concerns regarding their declining populations and the intricacies of their anatomy, including reproductive structures and dietary needs. Combining humor with scientific insights, this episode sheds light on the significance of these ancient insects in various ecosystems.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Odonatology (DRAGONFLIES) with Jessica Ware) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
Oh hey, it's the mail that you haven't opened sitting on your counter. Allie Ward, this is Ologies, this is Dragonflies. You did not know you needed an episode on that, but here we are. Okay, this is so good.

00:00:10 Speaker_03
Okay, so this guest is the only Dragonfly expert I wanted for the job. I've waited years to chat with her. And she got her undergrad degree at the University of British Columbia, Department of Zoology.

00:00:20 Speaker_03
She got a PhD at Rutgers in etymology and is currently a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where she serves as chair of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology. Also a professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School.

00:00:35 Speaker_03
She has been the president of the Worldwide Dragonfly Association and the Entomological Society of America. big deals, and the co-founder of Entomologists in Color. She knows dragonflies. We're here to talk about them.

00:00:47 Speaker_03
Now, first off, odonata sounds a little bit too much like odontology, which is the study of teeth. And I always got that confused, but there's a reason.

00:00:55 Speaker_03
Odonata means toothed ones, and it's the study of these big winged beauties that cause a lot of feelings in us to be discussed.

00:01:05 Speaker_03
We will do that in a moment, but first, a huge thank you to patrons who support the show at patreon.com slash ologies for as little as a dollar a month. Thank you to everyone in ologies shirts and hats and totes from ologiesmerch.com.

00:01:16 Speaker_03
We have shorter, kid-friendly, classroom-safe smologies episodes available wherever you get podcasts or the link in the show notes.

00:01:23 Speaker_03
Also, thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for this show, all of which I read, and they warm my heart and they help the show, and I prove it by combing through them and reading a new one every week.

00:01:33 Speaker_03
And this is from IShouldBeSleeping25 who wrote, in an age of brain rot and doom scrolling, ologies is a pinnacle of hope and brain growth. IShouldBeSleeping25, thank you for staying awake long enough to write that.

00:01:45 Speaker_03
So let's get right into this episode, which I'm putting out on the night of the US election. I'm literally recording this as ballots are coming in. Tomorrow is the 6th. It's my birthday. I hope it's a good one. I hope so.

00:01:58 Speaker_03
But for now, let's get into the differences between a damselfly and a dragonfly. How fast they can dart around. What cultures love and fear them. Faking your own death. The scariest babies in the world. Sending dragonflies to space.

00:02:13 Speaker_03
Sci-fi aviation inspiration. Mating choreography. Attracting them to your yard. Maybe to eat them. How big they were in the age of dinosaurs and why they are cooler than dinosaurs. with scholar, dragonfly expert, and thus, odontologist, Dr. Jessica Ware.

00:02:54 Speaker_03
And what is it like working with the museum? Is that bonkers? It's awesome.

00:02:59 Speaker_01
I love it. I worked at Rutgers for 10 years as a professor before coming here, and I loved it there too, in a different way. But the museum, it's kind of, it's like, it's the best. I mean, there's nothing, I can't imagine a better job.

00:03:13 Speaker_01
It's really, really fun.

00:03:15 Speaker_03
Did you go there when you were younger? Did you have like a history of going when you were, or when you were, come to the city? What's your history with the museum?

00:03:23 Speaker_01
Well, I'm from Canada, so I went to the Royal Ontario Museum. The ROM in Toronto, that's our natural history museum. My mom took my twin and I there quite often. I remember seeing a gorilla diorama. It's etched in my mind, this gorilla diorama.

00:03:37 Speaker_01
I know I went there when I was short enough that I could barely see inside the diorama.

00:03:42 Speaker_03
So Dr. Ware's first visit to New York's iconic American Museum of Natural History was, she was a wee one. It was about 25 years ago. But she did a postdoc there working on termite evolution.

00:03:55 Speaker_03
And she says she was nervous to apply for a full-time position at the museum because she thought she'd be a university professor, but she just has undergrads in the summer rather than throughout the year.

00:04:04 Speaker_01
And I certainly never ever in a million years thought that I would work here. It kind of felt like the same, but just with more time for fieldwork and more encouragement for fieldwork.

00:04:14 Speaker_03
Obviously, I love bugs a lot, so the notion of doing fieldwork and getting to see bugs in person as part of your job is like, what? That's a job? That's so exciting.

00:04:25 Speaker_01
Yeah, there's a lot of them out there. We do a lot of stuff in the Arctic, like 68, 69 degrees latitude, and then we do a lot of stuff in the tropics. They're both amazing insect fauna, insect communities, but they're very different.

00:04:40 Speaker_01
I have the temperate Arctic and tropical stuff. It's fun.

00:04:44 Speaker_03
Speaking of location, location, location. Where do dragonflies live? Are there dragonflies in the Arctic?

00:04:50 Speaker_01
What's their range like? Yeah, there's dozens and upon dozens in the Arctic. There's six that are kind of whole Arctic that have a circumpolar distribution. But there's over 40, I think, species that live north of the Arctic Circle.

00:05:03 Speaker_01
In general, I would say like dragonflies and damselflies are found globally everywhere except for Antarctica.

00:05:09 Speaker_03
So the upper Arctic reaches of the globe, but not in the snow and ice at the bottom of the globe. Although the globe's position really, I don't know why it matters. We could be floating any which way. You know what I mean?

00:05:20 Speaker_01
I've collected dragonflies in Namibia, which is a very dry, kind of deserty environment. But like, you can find them in deserts, you can find them in mountainous regions, temperate tropical Arctic, kind of, you name it, they're there.

00:05:33 Speaker_01
They've been around for a really long time, so they've basically fit themselves into a lot of different niche spaces.

00:05:39 Speaker_03
I feel like I have flimflam in my mind that they were at one point the size of a couch cushion, and I feel like that is not correct. How big, prehistorically, were they?

00:05:49 Speaker_01
So the proto kind of Odonata, the pre-dragonflies and damselflies, they're a group we call griffinflies commonly. They're in this family Meganuridae. They flew during the Carboniferous period, so like 350 million years ago. And those were big.

00:06:05 Speaker_01
Each wing was like 37 centimeters. So it's like, that's a pretty big size individual.

00:06:09 Speaker_03
So each wing was almost 15 inches long, and they were total about two feet across, weighing about a pound. So about as large as a small hawk or like a modern day crow, but crown odonates.

00:06:23 Speaker_01
So they're not modern dragonflies. Modern dragonflies and damselflies are younger. I think, you know, 250, 225 million years old or so.

00:06:33 Speaker_03
So a full 100 million years later.

00:06:36 Speaker_01
And depending on what you're measuring for size, right?

00:06:40 Speaker_01
There's either megaloprapus, which is a damselfly that weighs almost nothing, but it has a pretty big wingspan and a very long, very, very thin thread-like abdomen because it lays its eggs in tree holes.

00:06:54 Speaker_03
Oh.

00:06:54 Speaker_01
So that's a very big one in terms of just like the total measurements of centimeters. But then in terms of mass, probably it would be pedularity, which are a different family in Anisaphora the dragonflies.

00:07:06 Speaker_01
And some of the Pedularidae that live in Australia, Pedulara is one, Pedulara gigantea. It's got that name for a reason. I mean, it's like a good size. It's hefty. You know, it's not as long as Megaloprapus, but it weighs quite a bit.

00:07:20 Speaker_01
So depending on if you're going for like size in terms of length and width or size in terms of mass, then those are the two kind of biggest ones that we have nowadays.

00:07:29 Speaker_03
When did they go from the griffin flies to dragonflies? And also, who's naming them? Because named after griffins and dragons is pretty baller. It's pretty great.

00:07:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, those are some good names. I think they think that there was an English translation from a European language, like a Slavic language, for devil fly with this myth that there was a devil's horse that took to the sky.

00:07:54 Speaker_01
Then maybe that's how the name dragonfly came about. Well, they're not sure. So there's like a lot of common names for each of the families. Darners are the name, the common name for Anishinaabe.

00:08:06 Speaker_01
And they have an ovipositor that is sort of long, although to be honest, it's not as long as some other types of dragonflies. But anyways, some people thought it looked like a sewing needle because they lay their eggs in plant material.

00:08:17 Speaker_01
So they're called darners. But a lot of the damselflies are related to their color. I mean, they're all very colorful, but there's jewel wings and bluets for some of the damselfly names.

00:08:27 Speaker_01
And the common names vary in general sort of country by country, although the dragonfly community is pretty tight. So I think they're trying to come up with more universal common names across the order, across the families and such.

00:08:43 Speaker_03
Are there damselfly people and dragonfly people, and do they fight?

00:08:46 Speaker_01
I think odontology in general, really tight community, really good vibes only. But you tend to focus on one or the other, although there are some exceptions, but my specialty are dragonflies.

00:08:59 Speaker_01
And my colleague Seth Bybee, he really focuses on the damselflies. There's a lot. I mean, there's 3,000 of each of those groups, right? The 3,000 damselflies, 3,000 dragonflies-ish. And they do slightly different things.

00:09:13 Speaker_01
They all have freshwater nymphs, but the damselflies have gills that are external, and the dragonflies have internal gills.

00:09:20 Speaker_01
The dragonflies are kind of stocky-bodied, and some of them have lost their ovipositors, so they lay their eggs on the surface of water. None of the damselflies do that. They all lay their eggs in plants.

00:09:29 Speaker_01
So I feel like already, like, they're kind of a little bit different.

00:09:33 Speaker_03
So both damsel and dragonflies have an equal number of species, like a whopping 3000 each. And both their bibbis or their nymphs, sometimes called nyads, live in water. And we're gonna get to those absolute killing machines in a bit.

00:09:49 Speaker_03
But again, dragonflies have internal gills and kind of fatter bodies, both very cool. But let's say that a damselfly is kind of like a coupe or a sedan, while the other is an SUV.

00:10:02 Speaker_01
And I'm like firmly on Team Dragonfly, but I've published some stuff with like Ola Fink and I published on Megaloprepus on that really big damselfly. I mean, there's a lot of interesting things in damselflies.

00:10:15 Speaker_01
I guess I just like, I really love dragonflies.

00:10:19 Speaker_03
Do damselfly people Do their feelings get hurt when people call damselflies dragonflies, when there's the smaller, skinnier ones, and everyone's like, oh, dragonfly.

00:10:28 Speaker_03
Do you think there's a damselfly researcher who's just looking at their hands and wistfully walks home crying?

00:10:35 Speaker_01
I think a lot of us just use the word dragonfly. They mean both. But in general, if you said dragonflies, people think that you mean all of Odonata. So I think they would just think it was normal. They wouldn't be sad.

00:10:48 Speaker_03
Their life cycle is really fascinating to me. The nymphs are... bonkers from what I understand. And they look so different from the adults.

00:10:59 Speaker_03
Can you tell me a little bit about what their infancy and adolescence is like before they become the dragonflies that we see around?

00:11:08 Speaker_01
Yeah, for sure. Well, so females lay their eggs either in plant material, endophytic oviposition that's called, or on the surface of the water or the mud, exophytic oviposition that's called.

00:11:20 Speaker_03
damselflies, endophytic, in plants, dragonflies, exophytic, not in plants.

00:11:27 Speaker_01
In either case, the egg hatches when it develops in freshwater. There's like a couple of examples of things that we think are semi-terrestrial where they've been found kind of like walking in the moss around freshwater.

00:11:38 Speaker_01
But in general, they're inhabiting freshwater. There's a couple that have burrows, like some of the pedularity that I talked about, they actually have burrows. And there's somaticlora, an emerald. in North America that utilizes crayfish burrows.

00:11:51 Speaker_01
But in general, the eggs kind of settle somewhere in the water column or down at the bottom on the substrate. The nymphs hatch, and if they're juvenile damselflies, then they have these external gills that they use to breathe with.

00:12:04 Speaker_01
And if they're dragonflies, then they have these internal gills, these rectal pads that they use to breathe in.

00:12:09 Speaker_03
Yes, rectal gills. Nymphs can stick their dump trucks in the air and breathe through their butts. These ass gasping babies are hungry. No one is safe.

00:12:21 Speaker_01
They eat each other, they eat other aquatic insects, so mosquito larvae, dobsonfly larvae, mayfly larvae, catifly larvae, things like that. They can also eat small fish like minnows, and they can eat tadpoles.

00:12:33 Speaker_01
And depending on the taxon, some of them develop in like six weeks. There's a migratory dragonfly called Pantaleoflovescens, the global wanderer or wandering glider. are two common names people use for it.

00:12:45 Speaker_01
And it develops really fast, in like six weeks. In general, it kind of often takes advantage of like temporary water that pools up after rain. So it kind of makes sense it would be selected to develop kind of quickly.

00:12:57 Speaker_01
And then on the other extreme, there are things that develop over years. And in some extreme examples, people have said decades, where the juveniles basically are in freshwater. for quite a long time, kind of slowly molting and then becoming an adult.

00:13:13 Speaker_01
So in the Arctic systems that we are doing a lot of sampling in, those juveniles are actually frozen in the wintertime and they freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw. And even in the temperate systems, like in Northern Ontario, like where my Nana lives,

00:13:27 Speaker_01
the lake freezes solids, right? So the nymphs are either burrowing down into the substrate or in part freezing. So just like for all insects, right? There's these like rise and fall of hormones.

00:13:39 Speaker_01
So juvenile hormone, like those things kind of rise and fall. And then when the timing is right, the hormone levels are right, then they have their final molt.

00:13:47 Speaker_01
to adulthood and what happens in that case is they have a trigger to kind of crawl out of the water and they usually cling to like some veg or like a boathouse or a dock or like whatever thing that they can cling to and then the

00:14:02 Speaker_01
adult, it kind of pulls itself out of this larval skin, which are called exuvia. I think in Europe they call them imagines. But anyways, those are kind of left behind. So often you can find exuvia or imagines kind of in the veg around fresh water.

00:14:17 Speaker_03
These exuvia, in my unasked for opinion, are gorgeous to behold. And if you look closely in the summer around lakes or ponds, you might find papery, empty ghost shells of dragonfly nymphs.

00:14:30 Speaker_03
And they look a little bit like cicada molts, if you've ever seen one of those. And these little insect husks get their name exuvia from meaning things stripped from a body.

00:14:41 Speaker_03
And I like to imagine that the young dragonfly was like, felt raptured, just ascended to fly through the air and then left their exuvia behind like pants.

00:14:50 Speaker_01
And then the adult has to take some time. Its wings develop while they're crumpled up in these wing pads while they're larvae or nymphs.

00:14:58 Speaker_01
And then when they become an adult, they kind of shunt their hemolymph out and they kind of stretch their wings out. They slowly dry and we call harden up. When they're first emerged, they're very soft body, very vulnerable.

00:15:10 Speaker_01
And then once they've hardened up, then they take off and they eat as much as they can. They build up fat stores and then they're They're adults and they just do things that adults do, which is mating, dispersing, and laying eggs.

00:15:24 Speaker_03
Do they even eat as adults or do they do all their eating as little hungry, hungry hippos under the water?

00:15:31 Speaker_01
No, they eat a lot as adults. They do! Depending on the taxon, some of them have a lot of spines on their tibia, and they actually are kind of like bringing food in towards their mouth as they're flying.

00:15:43 Speaker_01
Often if you see dragonflies, they do this behavior called hawking, where they'll kind of be flying. Often you see it like if you live in suburbia, like over

00:15:51 Speaker_01
you know, a lawn or if you're near a meadow in a more rural setting, you see them kind of flying often at dusk or in the middle of the afternoon. That's what they're doing, kind of gliding back and forth, just eating.

00:16:02 Speaker_01
And they have to build up quite a bit of fat stores and they use those fat stores for their flight, which is really energetically expensive. But then also like when they're mating, some dragonflies and damselflies are territorial.

00:16:16 Speaker_01
And so they do these mating kind of dances or these flight competitions. And you need to have a lot of fat stores for that. Often what dragonflies will do is they'll, and damselflies is that they'll just fly until they use up their fat stores.

00:16:29 Speaker_01
And then they just kind of drop into the water. And they did. So in their best interest, they would be selected to kind of be constantly eating to keep their fat stores high.

00:16:40 Speaker_03
So they eat and they fly doing cardio until they get fatally shredded and then they just have a burial at sea or at pond. I had no idea that they were out there hunting too.

00:16:53 Speaker_03
How long, typically, I know it must range from like a day to like 10 years or something, but how long does dragonfly live once it is an adult? How long is it out flying around?

00:17:06 Speaker_01
So it's always around the same. So the juvenile stage can vary, six weeks to maybe decades, maybe two decades, who knows, right? That's bonkers.

00:17:15 Speaker_01
But I think like five years is, would be like an oldish, and there's a couple of extreme outliers, but often they're one or two years, you know, three or four years.

00:17:25 Speaker_03
That's just the nymph stage, either from six weeks to a decade.

00:17:30 Speaker_01
Then the adult stage is usually like one hot summer, right? So usually In temperate regions, it's like from May to maybe October.

00:17:40 Speaker_01
There's a couple of examples, individuals that were around for several months, but it's definitely not usually more than a year. And it would definitely be less than a year in most cases.

00:17:50 Speaker_01
So the adult stage, they really have this like solitary goal of dispersing mating and laying their eggs. Like that's their whole thing. It's not really doing growth or maintenance, right?

00:18:03 Speaker_03
So it's like a longer adolescence and a shorter adulthood, essentially.

00:18:07 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah, for sure. With the exception of, like I said, the wandering glider or global wanderer, the Pantaleofevescens, it's six weeks development time, and then it lives for a couple of months. So that's one where it's reversed.

00:18:17 Speaker_01
But in the majority of cases, the juvenile is a longer stage than the adult for a lot of dragonflies and damselflies.

00:18:25 Speaker_03
I feel like I know people with dragonfly tattoos. I know people who see dragonflies as a... Do you? I have one. Gorgeous.

00:18:33 Speaker_01
How long have you had it? Maybe 10 years or something like that. I've had it for a while.

00:18:39 Speaker_03
So Dr. Ware pushed up her long sleeve shirt and showed me what looked like a silhouette of a dragonfly, of course. It was a beautiful artwork. So on brand. You had already been studying dragonflies at that point? Yeah. Yeah, you were in it.

00:18:53 Speaker_03
You're like Team Dragonfly.

00:18:55 Speaker_01
Actually, I have a damselfly.

00:18:57 Speaker_03
I don't have a dragonfly. I was wrong. A damselfly tattoo. This was surprising.

00:19:01 Speaker_01
This is an ebony jewelwing, Callopteryx maculata. But I picked this one because The wings themselves are like black in color. And so I thought it would be easy for a tattoo artist to do it without, sometimes like the venation is very important.

00:19:16 Speaker_01
It's correlated with like flight behavior. So if they did the veins wrong on the tattoo, I would know that it was wrong and that it couldn't fly right.

00:19:23 Speaker_01
So I was a little bit anxious about having a tattoo that I was going to dislike afterwards if the venation wasn't right.

00:19:30 Speaker_03
So Callopteryx maculata means beautiful wing. And this ebony jewel-winged damselfly has a slender, metallic, blue-green body, looks like a sports car paint job, and wings that look almost opaque, like a velvety black with subtly visible venation.

00:19:49 Speaker_03
That's what I was going to ask you. How many times do you see dragonfly tattoos and things in pop culture that are anatomically not right?

00:19:58 Speaker_01
Well, most of the time people put really long antennae and dragonflies and damselflies have very, very, very small, almost like, not visible antennae. They're very, very, very small.

00:20:08 Speaker_01
So if you have something with long antennae, it's usually an antlion or something like that. So a lot of people, they're like, oh, I have this dragonfly tattoo, and then they show it to me, and I'm like, oh, it's an antlion, or it's like a daraptra.

00:20:19 Speaker_01
But of course I don't say that, because that would be rude. So I'm just like, oh, that's very cool. Because I think it's cool that they want to get an odonata tattoo.

00:20:25 Speaker_01
But if it has long antennae, I actually said that to my tattoo artist when he was doing this tattoo. The first sketch, I was like, oh, no, no, no. Antennae, gotta go. And they're like, but insects have antennae.

00:20:35 Speaker_01
And I'm like, no, dragonflies and damselflies, you wouldn't see them. They're almost like, no, we can't have them on there. I'm not gonna have an eroptera tattoo, come on. No. I mean, not that they're not cool too, but.

00:20:49 Speaker_03
I love that that tattoo artist has probably thought about you every single time they've seen a dragonfly.

00:20:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, he said he had just done a tattoo for his wife and he was like, oh, thank goodness I didn't put long antennae on hers because she didn't want them. And I was like, yeah,

00:21:02 Speaker_03
It's very good. What was your ambassador bug species? Was it a dragonfly or what got you out looking around for bugs?

00:21:13 Speaker_01
Well, I spent a lot of time near water because I lived in Canada and we spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents and they lived on a lake. like Muskoka. And so we saw a lot of dragonflies and damselflies for sure.

00:21:26 Speaker_01
But I didn't, I didn't think I was going to ever study them, to be honest. I was curious about them. But like, we were kind of curious about the natural world, I would say, like in general.

00:21:34 Speaker_01
But then when I went to UBC, I went to University of British Columbia for my undergrad, and I was going to do marine biology, but I ended up switching into entomology.

00:21:42 Speaker_01
My first undergrad experience doing fieldwork was working on mysisticaster, which is sister to that big one that I talked about, Megalocarpus. It's a damselfly, and it lays its eggs in bromeliad plants.

00:21:54 Speaker_01
It was really fun, but I still was like, oh, this stuff is so cool. There's no way I could ever contribute to this because all the cool stuff has been done. There's no way.

00:22:03 Speaker_01
So I'll just go do something very practical and work on food security and maybe do biological control. So that's what I went to grad school to do. But then I ended up not really loving entomopathogenic nematodes as much as you think you would.

00:22:17 Speaker_01
You think you'd be like, wow, that's a page turner. Turns out, wasn't turning a page for me.

00:22:21 Speaker_01
And then thank goodness, Mike May, my hero, my late advisor, unfortunately passed away last year, but he was one of the world's dragonfly experts and foremost odontologist. And I switched into his lab and he said to me, what are you talking about?

00:22:37 Speaker_01
There are so many unanswered questions for Odinates, like so many, like many, many lifetimes worth of work to do. And his encouragement was really wonderful.

00:22:47 Speaker_03
That's so sweet and so interesting how paths can change just in an instant from someone that you meet or from one thing that a person says and that changed the course of the field just by encouraging someone to be like, no, hop in here. Yeah.

00:23:03 Speaker_01
We got a lot of questions. I mean, Mike, I think, changed odontology Well, he certainly changed the way that I even looked at science. Because he was exactly that person that was always like, oh, you want to come?

00:23:16 Speaker_01
Here, let me hold the door open for you. And he made a community that everyone wanted to be part of, where everyone was able to participate. Like, if you like dragonflies, you're in. That's the only requirement, is that you have to sort of like them.

00:23:29 Speaker_01
And I think the whole community was so much better for that philosophy. But if that's your grounding philosophy, everyone who wants to join can join. I mean, no wonder it's such a great community.

00:23:39 Speaker_03
Yeah. And what are odontologists studying? What are you looking at now?

00:23:45 Speaker_01
It's a lot. I mean, it varies, right? Mike wasn't wrong that there's so much left to be done, right? So much that we don't know. With some collaborators, Seth, I mentioned John, Vincent, Rob, Paul. There's a few of us. We work together.

00:23:57 Speaker_01
I was my postdoc, Lacey, and some graduate students were trying to get like the tree of life of dragonflies down.

00:24:03 Speaker_03
She says that by dragonflies, she means both them and damselflies. And they're working on specifically sequencing as many species as possible to figure out who's related to whom and where their tree of life branched in these different directions.

00:24:18 Speaker_01
In my lab, I'm really interested in reproductive evolution. So the evolution of male reproductive structures, female reproductive structures.

00:24:24 Speaker_01
Some people in other labs are interested in vision or like oxen pigments, or others are really interested in particular types of behavior or nymph or larval behavior. I guess it really varies. Like you name it, somebody is working on it.

00:24:37 Speaker_01
Female storage organs, color, structural pigmentation. The chemical composition of wings, the nymphs, they, as you mentioned, look very different from the adults.

00:24:47 Speaker_01
And they feed with this thing called a labial mask, which kind of like is this mouth part that kind of shoots outwards and grabs the prey and then brings it in towards their mandibles.

00:24:55 Speaker_04
Well, that's terrifying.

00:24:57 Speaker_01
Sebastian Busse and others are like looking at the functional morphology of that structure. So I think like, as you look globally, there's a lot of people working on very, very cool questions.

00:25:09 Speaker_01
And I feel like they're all complimentary, like, they all are fitting together to tell this story of like, you know, the last 300 million years of evolution for this group.

00:25:19 Speaker_03
Is there a group text for Odin?

00:25:23 Speaker_01
I mean, kind of. There's like an Odin at a listserv, I guess. And there's lots of dragonfly groups. But there's like a worldwide dragonfly association, the WDA. We have dragonfly meetings every two years.

00:25:35 Speaker_01
And so that's a good chance for people to kind of come together. There's a Black odontology group that has a lot of people from West Africa, but really people globally.

00:25:43 Speaker_01
There's this Sociedad Odontológica Latinoamericana, which is for Central and South America, and everyone collaborates together, which is wonderful.

00:25:53 Speaker_03
Can I ask you some questions from patrons about those facets? Oh yeah, sure. These are listeners who know you're coming on. They have Dragonfly questions.

00:26:04 Speaker_03
Anything that comes up in terms of charity or anything associated with Mike, too, in his honor that you'd want to donate to?

00:26:12 Speaker_01
Oh, that's very nice. Mike was the former president of the World Dragonfly Association.

00:26:17 Speaker_01
uh so was I and so that might be a good one that's a 501c and the mission and goal is to really promote the study of dragonflies and damselflies worldwide uh and so any donations that go to them help to they have a journal that they publish and then they also use it for funding for students to go to conferences this dragonfly meeting which is so fun it's every two years

00:26:38 Speaker_01
So that might be a good one to donate to. That's great. Thank you.

00:26:42 Speaker_03
So each episode we donate to a cause of theologist's choosing and this week it's going to the World Dragonfly Association in honor of Dr. Michael Love May.

00:26:50 Speaker_03
Literally this guy's middle name was Love and I found his obituary and it describes him as a fair, compassionate, and caring mentor, a scholar, and a naturalist, but also a gentle, kind man

00:27:04 Speaker_03
who spoiled dogs, took children seriously, and loved his wife with great devotion. As a friend, he was amusing, tolerant, and loyal. As a father, above all, perceptive.

00:27:15 Speaker_03
And as a beloved husband, he was thoughtful and generous, a partner eager to share the world. So a donation will be made in his name to the World Dragonfly Association, thanks to sponsors of the show.

00:27:27 Speaker_03
Okay, let's dip into your questions, damsels, dragons, flies, patrons. You too can submit questions, even audio questions, to get your voice on the show by contributing to patreon.com slash ologies. It starts at a dollar a month.

00:27:40 Speaker_03
Now, this first question comes from patrons Hope J and first-time question asker Turner Pierce. So you mentioned you were looking at reproductive structures and Hope J and Turner Pierce wanted to know, is there sexual dimorphism?

00:27:52 Speaker_03
Is there a way to distinguish a male and female dragonfly?

00:27:55 Speaker_01
Absolutely. So what you'll do is when you're looking at the dragonfly, you want to look at the base of the abdomen. So males are unique in that they have two sets of reproductive structures.

00:28:06 Speaker_01
So they have a penis at the tip of their abdomen, from which sperm is ejaculated, and they put it into a second penis, which is at the base of their abdomen.

00:28:14 Speaker_02
There are two of them.

00:28:16 Speaker_01
And this second penis is called the vesica spermalis. It's a sperm pump. And they use that second penis to transfer the sperm into the female. So it's indirect sperm transfer.

00:28:27 Speaker_01
But they also use that second penis to displace the previous male sperm, because females can store sperm. She has both short-term and long-term sperm storage organs, the spermatheca and the bursa copulatrix.

00:28:40 Speaker_01
Males use the secondary penis to either scrape out the previous male sperm or like pack deeply in the previous male sperm, like displace it in some way. And then they transfer their ejaculate.

00:28:52 Speaker_03
Just going to kind of move this out of the way. Like if you went to a potluck and you threw away someone else's casserole or just hid it in a cabinet.

00:29:01 Speaker_01
And so you can look at it under a scanning electron microscope and it's very cool because a lot of variation on a theme, like selection has acted. So lots of different species have slightly different things.

00:29:12 Speaker_01
Some look like a scoop, some looks like ragged claws, like it really varies.

00:29:18 Speaker_01
But if you don't have a microscope, a scanning electron microscope, and you're just holding a dragonfly, or if you're just up close looking at it, if it's perched somewhere, just look at the base of their abdomen near where it meets the thorax.

00:29:29 Speaker_01
And if there's a bump there, that's the penis, right? females have a very smooth ventral part of their abdomen. There's no ridges, there's no bumps there.

00:29:39 Speaker_01
So if you see something that looks like a little bump or a little notch kind of sticking out at the base of the first, second, third kind of segment of the abdomen, then that's the secondary penis and you know you have a male.

00:29:49 Speaker_01
There's other things that you sometimes, not all things have color dimorphisms, but some do. In a lot of damselflies, there's variation in the wing color pattern between males and females.

00:29:59 Speaker_01
So this tattoo that I have is Colopteryx maculata, and the males have completely black wings, but the females, it's dusky and not completely black. So there's like variations like that.

00:30:09 Speaker_01
And then in a lot of males, they actually have like a waxy, what they call a prunescence. like a waxy secretion that coats their whole body that they get with age, with maturity, and that gives them a bluish hue.

00:30:22 Speaker_01
So often males and females, for example, the Eastern Pond Hawk is bright green as a male and female, but over time, as the males get older, they secrete this wax over their body, and then they end up looking completely blue.

00:30:35 Speaker_03
It's like graying at the temple, sort of, like silver fox, almost.

00:30:40 Speaker_01
Yeah, blue fox.

00:30:41 Speaker_03
Yeah. Oh, man. What about colors in general?

00:30:45 Speaker_03
And many of you, including Rowan Tree, Kyla C., Mouse Paxton, Eating Dog Hair for a Living, Earl of Grammalkin, Rachel Prostako, Charlotte Parkinson, Jesse Meeks, Adam T. Burns, Rachel Fallon, Arie Fox, Popsicle Emperor, Flosatron, Brian Shenanigans, Hope J., Devin, J. Shea, Jackie G., Nicole S., and Elta Sparks also asked about this, as well as

00:31:04 Speaker_03
Turner Pierce wanted to know, are they all colorful and iridescent? Doesn't that coloring make them more appealing to predators? Alyssa Hoff, Sedoni S, a bunch of different people wanted to know, why are they so colorful?

00:31:16 Speaker_03
Alyssa asked, are there colors for a specific reason, for mating, for predator scaraway reasons?

00:31:23 Speaker_01
Those are good questions, I would say. So first of all, are they all colorful? No, not really. Most of them are. There's two types of color.

00:31:30 Speaker_01
There's structural color, where there's like bumps on their cuticle, and when light bounces off of it, it's perceived as a color. Often the metallic colored ones are like that, and that's a structural color.

00:31:41 Speaker_01
And the ones that have structural color, it's very cool because in the fossils that we have, and not all, but in some of the fossils that we have, the compression fossil also has the same bumps and rugosities.

00:31:50 Speaker_01
So then when the light bounces off of it, it looks like it's metallic green, which is very cool. But then there's also just pigment granules in their epithelial cells.

00:31:59 Speaker_01
And some dragonflies, that's how their coloration is, is from these pigment granules. And the pigment can vary, right? Some have melanin, some have omicrons, like there's various types of pigment.

00:32:08 Speaker_01
And so there are some things that fly at night, like the shadow dragons is the common name of this genus Neurocordelia that flies when it's too dark to kind of read a newspaper. And they are not very colorful.

00:32:19 Speaker_01
They're very drab, as you might expect, because they're flying at night, right? Dragonflies don't have great vision at night. They're very good at seeing things in the day, but not as good at seeing things at night.

00:32:29 Speaker_01
And so I guess there's just been selection for a loss of the bright color, and they're kind of drab-ish brown in color.

00:32:35 Speaker_03
So those metallic greens and blues aren't pigment-based, but rather the shape and the texture of the chitin that makes up their exoskeleton, just like how many blue bird feathers are structural.

00:32:48 Speaker_03
And you may have learned that in the plumology episode about feathers, which we'll link in the show notes. But other colors are pigment-based, kind of like the color of our hair and skin.

00:32:56 Speaker_01
Then in terms of why they're colorful, a lot of the patterns that you see are for sexual signaling. So male, like the patterns on their wings might be for male signaling to other males, males and females communicating to each other.

00:33:09 Speaker_01
But then there's also color patterns that relate to thermoregulation. So males and females are able to kind of have their pigment granules migrate up and down in their epithelial cells. to give them like a bright color or a dark color.

00:33:22 Speaker_01
And the idea is maybe that the dark color allows them to absorb more heat and the bright color to kind of shut more heat. There's some idea that maybe this waxy prunescence is to prevent desiccation. It's an anti-aging technique.

00:33:35 Speaker_01
There are others, Plathemys lydia is a good one, the white tail, where the abdomen itself is actually like a kind of a bright white color.

00:33:43 Speaker_01
And some people have suggested that perhaps that's to allow it to kind of, it's a percher and it often perches out in the sun. And so that allows it to kind of shunt a lot of heat out of its body.

00:33:53 Speaker_01
So I think there's a combination of factors in terms of whether or not it can make you more visible or less visible to predators.

00:34:01 Speaker_01
I mean, Amanda Wispel did her thesis on this damselfly called Argia apicalis, which actually changes its color right after mating. Males actually change their color to being in dark phase versus bright phase.

00:34:12 Speaker_01
And she argued that it had a lot to do with predation, right? So it allows them to be less visible.

00:34:17 Speaker_03
And this is also a flex.

00:34:19 Speaker_01
So I mean, I think there's a lot of possibilities and some of those might be happening at the same time. So more than one of those things could be happening at the same time. Thermoregulation, sexual signaling, and avoidance of predators.

00:34:32 Speaker_03
Going back to reproduction, so many people, Jesse Crawford said, what's the deal with the way they mate? Which is a broad question. What's the deal?

00:34:44 Speaker_03
Jesse says, I've seen what I assume is the male with the end of his tail inserted into the back of the female's head. What's going on? How are they actually getting it on? Devin Naples wants to know.

00:34:55 Speaker_03
when I see two dragonflies fluttering about attached to each other, are they doing what I think they're doing? Are they making whoopee? Dragonfly sexy times. A lot of people want to know what's going on there.

00:35:04 Speaker_03
Key Lime Pie, Raniel Mandre, Bjorn Fredberg, Rachel Guthrie, Mallory Skinner, Sophia A. Clover, and Alyssa Hoff, who asked, do they do butt stuff? I see them stuck together by their butts.

00:35:15 Speaker_03
Cheesemonger wanted to know, why do they appear to keep banging while flying? Seems fun. But Jennifer Froh said, why not land and do that? With Storm adding, seems like a hard way to do it. Let's get into it.

00:35:27 Speaker_01
So the heart-shaped wheel that you see of the males and females together, we call the copulatory wheel, and that indeed is usually males and females doing mating, like as broadly defined, right?

00:35:39 Speaker_01
Often what they're doing while they're flying around isn't necessarily the male ejaculating, right? Because remember, males make the sperm in the tip of their abdomen in that first penis,

00:35:50 Speaker_01
put it into the sperm pump, but then before any sharing of their genetic information, they do the sperm displacement, so the scraping, right? Oh, that. Yes.

00:35:59 Speaker_01
So when males want to mate with a female, they have these appendages at the tip of their abdomen called the anal appendages or the claspers, and they grab the female behind the back of her, head on the back of her thorax,

00:36:11 Speaker_01
In some damselflies, there's actually pits in the back of the female's thorax, and the males fit their appendages into these pits, and it's kind of like a lock and key mechanism. In a lot of odonates, it's not like that.

00:36:23 Speaker_01
The males just kind of grab wildly.

00:36:24 Speaker_01
Sometimes they do damage the eyes, because the males can walk on the back of the female's eyes, and you can see females with damage to the back of her eyes, because the omatini are fragile, and they can break with the tarsae and the tarsal claws kind of walking on them.

00:36:37 Speaker_03
So this copulatory wheel, it looks like two dragonflies locked in kind of a heart shape, but actually it's the female of the species getting her head hooked and maybe her eyes clawed while mating.

00:36:49 Speaker_03
I don't want to talk about it or think about it today, but at least female dragonflies have options.

00:36:54 Speaker_01
So the male clasps the female and then the female has a choice, right? She can bring her abdomen up to the secondary genitalia, right? At the base of his abdomen for the sperm transfer or not.

00:37:05 Speaker_01
And sometimes you see males holding females and she does not bring her abdomen up. In theory with the lock and key mechanism, if the key doesn't fit in the lock properly,

00:37:14 Speaker_01
then maybe the female won't bring her abdomen up because it's a sign that it's not the right species, right? Those are kind of species-specific locking keys. But like I said, not all odonates have a locking key mechanism.

00:37:25 Speaker_01
So when the female and the males enter this copulatory wheel, they can either stay perched somewhere or they can fly together. Sometimes they fly together where both of them are flapping their wings.

00:37:37 Speaker_01
But in other species, only the male flaps his wings, which really affects his flight behavior, right? Sometimes males and females, after the sperm is transferred, they let go of each other.

00:37:47 Speaker_01
And the male will either be like, peace, I'm out, no contact guarding. Or the males will do what's called non-contact guarding, where they'll stay near the female while she lays her eggs, and they'll chase away other males.

00:38:00 Speaker_01
Because of course, if another male grabs a female, he'll just scrape out the male's sperm, right? And he wants to ensure paternity. That's called non-contact guarding, where they just chase away other males.

00:38:09 Speaker_01
And then the other option is contact guarding. And that's where the males and females stay attached to each other, right through as the female is laying her eggs.

00:38:18 Speaker_03
So they can peace, I'm out. They can be a bouncer to the female, kind of on the lookout, or they can just stay attached.

00:38:26 Speaker_01
There's a couple of wacky exceptions called interrupted tandem, where males will like, let go of a female, grab her again, let go of a female, grab her again.

00:38:33 Speaker_01
But those are, it's more common that it's either like no guarding whatsoever, non-contact guarding, or it's contact guarding this tandem.

00:38:42 Speaker_03
How long does it take between receiving the sperm and laying an egg? Are they able to do it quicker than you could get a pizza, or is he guarding her for days?

00:38:53 Speaker_01
Oh yeah, quicker than you can get a pizza, for sure. People used to think that maybe the last sperm in was the first sperm out that she would fertilize her eggs with.

00:39:03 Speaker_01
We don't think that's necessarily true anymore, but she's able to lay eggs pretty much right away. Some dragonflies have their eggs ripen in batches. This is work that Camilla Cock in Urine to Land did.

00:39:16 Speaker_01
They lay their eggs in batches, but other dragonflies, the majority of them have their eggs ripe all the time. So as soon as she has sperm, she can lay her eggs. She just needs to find suitable habitat.

00:39:26 Speaker_01
That's often why you see dragonflies mating at water, because then they're right there, and then the water's right there, and they can lay their eggs.

00:39:33 Speaker_03
What about her ovipositor? Is that something that you can also see if you happen to have a dragonfly land on you?

00:39:40 Speaker_01
Sure. It depends on the dragonfly. So if it's a damselfly, they all will have an ovipositor.

00:39:46 Speaker_01
If it's a dragonfly in the darner family or the hnidae, the pedlaridae, which are the petal tails, or the cordula gastridae, they have pretty honking, they're called spike tails because their ovipositor is really long.

00:39:58 Speaker_03
Imagine a skinny little fingernail at the tip of your behind. It's like, hello.

00:40:02 Speaker_01
Those ones then you definitely will see the ovipositor. It looks like a small little blade, in some cases serrated. It's a series of gonopophyses that kind of fit together in this interlocking device.

00:40:13 Speaker_01
It's like a little knife that cuts a hole in plant material to put the eggs in. But if you were to catch the most species-rich two groups, are the Libelluloidea and the Gomphidae.

00:40:24 Speaker_01
The club tails are the Gomphidae and the Libelluloidea are things like skimmers and emeralds. And both of those groups have lost their overpositor. So you wouldn't see it.

00:40:33 Speaker_01
You would just see, like, if you flip them over, you would see what's called a vulvar lamina, kind of just like a little flap. and they squirt out their eggs like in a clump from that little flap. They don't even need an ovipositor.

00:40:43 Speaker_03
They're like, it's fine.

00:40:45 Speaker_01
No, no ovipositor, because they're not using plant material. So you really only need the ovipositor to put it into plants.

00:40:52 Speaker_03
And then do those eggs hatch in the plants and then crawl and find water and then live their life as adolescents when they are in plant material?

00:41:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty fast. They don't lay them like, up in a tree or anything like that. Like they're laid right at the water surface. And then you can sometimes even see on plants the scars where the eggs have been laid. Oh, that's awesome.

00:41:17 Speaker_03
So while usually damselflies are more delicate looking, the largest of the odonates is a damselfly. So the smallest is actually a dragonfly. So that's a little flippy floppy. And skimmers are dragonflies, like the bright red ones you might see.

00:41:33 Speaker_03
But skimmers are called chasers in some countries. Now, Darners, again, have that long overpositor and are super fast flyers, but now you can just go get a bug book and start kind of gawking at all of them.

00:41:45 Speaker_03
But if you are less into outside and books and more into inside and screens, we had media questions from Guido Ferry, Mama Bee, and Dad Ossie, Scott Hanley, and Amanda Loves Kurt. Questions about pop culture. Oh yeah.

00:42:01 Speaker_03
Someone asked, this is very specific, Claire Ritchie said, Carrie Colby voice, a dragonfly? A dragonfly? If you eat the entire thing, I will give you $1,000. I swear to you, right now. I can't believe you just said that. I eat ass, you guys.

00:42:21 Speaker_03
I can eat a butt. RuPaul's Drag Race fans need to know, are dragonflies edible? Apparently, have you heard anything about drag race and eating dragonflies?

00:42:32 Speaker_01
No, but I'm here for it. And I will just say, dragonflies are absolutely edible. If you were ever to eat an insect, that's the one that I would eat.

00:42:40 Speaker_01
I mean, I've eaten a lot of insects in my lifetime, but dragonflies, their thorax is just pure muscle, right? So they actually don't have a lot of fat. They're always flying, burning their fat stores.

00:42:51 Speaker_01
And their muscle, their thorax, the entire thing is just one, like just blocks of muscle. So they're a high protein thing. If that's the, like, if it was me and I was wanting to eat something, I would break the wings off.

00:43:04 Speaker_01
I would probably take the abdomen off because I don't need that. And I would just eat the thorax and you would have a little protein snack. It's like shrimps, sort of, kind of shrimpy.

00:43:14 Speaker_03
Maybe a little bit if it's muscle, I don't know.

00:43:16 Speaker_01
Maybe, I mean, I often think of the insects as kind of nutty. I actually don't eat shrimp because I'm allergic to shrimp. So maybe that's what shrimp tastes like. Maybe shrimp tastes like nuts. I don't know.

00:43:26 Speaker_03
Okay, so I looked into this for us, and yes, you can eat dragonflies, but check the species first. Try not to eat an endangered one.

00:43:34 Speaker_03
Now, as we discussed in our entomophagy anthropology episode about eating bugs, the most humane way to kill them is to lower their temperature. You could put them in the freezer.

00:43:44 Speaker_03
And in general, people say eating some raw bugs should be fine, but if you can cook them, do that.

00:43:51 Speaker_03
And for more on how and why humans do eat dragonflies, you can see the pretty new 2024 study, Edible Dragonflies and Damselflies, Order Odonata, as Human Food, a Comprehensive Review, which states that edible insects are rich in nutritional value with protein, fat, carbohydrate, vitamins, and minerals at levels that meet human nutritional requirements.

00:44:13 Speaker_03
and that folks who have eaten dragonflies say they taste a lot like shellfish due to the external skeletons while others described the flavor as quote a meaty vegetable and a bit nutty especially when roasted but the study does warn that some of the same allergens in shellfish are present in other invertebrates like bugs so if you're allergic to shellfish

00:44:33 Speaker_03
Be careful there. Also, heavy metal toxins from water sources could be present and accumulate. So if Odonata are to be eaten in big quantities, farming is the way to go. And again, cooking it better in case there's bacteria. I don't know.

00:44:48 Speaker_03
I'm not your doctor, but be smart about it. Don't just pluck one off a piece of fabric on a reality show and raw dog it for money straight down the gullet. Now, I read one culinary message board that said they are, in fact, like a soft-shelled crab.

00:45:03 Speaker_03
Pretty darn tasty. And, if you ask me, better for the planet than a bunch of cleared rainforests filled with sad farting cows. So you could and should eat them. And, well, we'll get to conservation in a second.

00:45:18 Speaker_03
But a few people, Guido Ferri, Bjorn Fredberg, Laurie Pemberton, wanted to know, in Laurie's words, ornithopters in Dune, could that be a real thing? There are helicopters that look like dragonflies in Dune.

00:45:29 Speaker_03
I'm not sure if you've seen them, but you watch Dune and you're like, those are huge dragonflies.

00:45:34 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:45:34 Speaker_03
They're bonkers. Do people send you so many articles and pictures of them when Dune movies come out?

00:45:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, absolutely. Yes, one. Yes. And there also was the name of a spacecraft that didn't look like a dragonfly, but it was named after dragonfly. And my mentions got all messed up because of all these dragonfly things.

00:45:52 Speaker_01
And I was like, oh my gosh, everyone's talking about dragonflies in that kind of space.

00:45:57 Speaker_03
Okay, so I look this up. According to NASA, Dragonfly is this quadcopter drone designed to explore the chemistry and the habitability of Saturn's moon, Titan.

00:46:09 Speaker_03
And I'm thinking when they're building it, I hope they refer to it as a Nyad, because how cute would that be, like a little nymph? Also, if it's like its Odonata namesake, then it would be powered by mosquito larvae and worms.

00:46:24 Speaker_03
And if it's a baby, it could collect them by unhinging its hell mouth jaw, which dragonfly naiads do. They toss it out like a javelin while it's still attached to their face.

00:46:35 Speaker_03
And then some of them have pinchers that capture their fuel and then bring it back to their mouth. It's bonkers. It's what Odonata nymphs can do. And it is terrifying and inspiring.

00:46:48 Speaker_03
which brings us to a question about technology from patrons Ron, Sam, Jesse Crawford, Cleb, Jamie, and Thomas Payne who wanted to know, are dragonflies a model for future human flight? Yeah.

00:46:59 Speaker_01
I mean, humans have for a long time taken inspiration by dragonfly flight. You know, dragonflies do a lot of the things that we want to do when we try and design aircrafts that are, you know, stealthy or energetically inexpensive, right?

00:47:13 Speaker_01
You know, ratio, long and thin wings are really good for long distance flight and for fast flight. The turning radius is affected by the shape and camber and pitch and yaw, all the things that we have to worry about when we think about flight.

00:47:26 Speaker_01
Dragonflies have been, you know, presumably having selection act on that for millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. So I think humans have looked to dragonfly flight quite a lot.

00:47:35 Speaker_01
But then certainly as inspiration for sci-fi, I mean, it's hard to imagine a better kind of model for something that is very good at targeted flight. They do interception style predation.

00:47:46 Speaker_01
So they're able to kind of maneuver very well in and amongst vegetation. They're able to catch prey very quickly. I mean, it's kind of an ideal flyer.

00:47:55 Speaker_03
And speaking of that, gnomes lorimer, how does their flying work? And can they just hover? So many people wanted to know. First time question asker, Sarah Filo, wanted to know why do they fly like that? So chaotic and unpredictable.

00:48:09 Speaker_03
It seems like they turn so fast and I blink and then they're gone. A bunch of you wanted to know this and I will say your names very swiftly. Cuddle Cuddle, Isabel LeClerc, Rachel, G.J.

00:48:18 Speaker_03
Wyatt, Olivia Calas, Lauren Shingley, Philippe Jimenez, Nathan Marion, Kalina Anderson, Theda and Odysseus, Flora Borowinkle, and Lori Pemberton, who asked, what's the top speed a dragonfly can reach?

00:48:29 Speaker_03
Oliver Calas wanted to know, how many times a minute do they beat their wings? Do we know? Are they like near hummingbirds? in terms of how fast they beat the wings. But yeah, what's going on with the flying?

00:48:40 Speaker_01
So it really depends on the taxa. So some things fly very high up in the air column. They fly very fast. There's reports of Darners that can fly 30 miles an hour, for example.

00:48:50 Speaker_01
And then there are other things that barely flutter, that never leave the pond from which they emerge. And we tend to think of them as being quite poor flyers.

00:48:58 Speaker_01
People tend to think of damselflies as being kind of poor flyers than dragonflies, although there are things like that Megaloprapis, that big giant helicopter damselfly, the one that lays its eggs in tree holes. And Ipflies, I've seen it fly.

00:49:10 Speaker_01
It's really hard to catch. I mean, it looks like it's just barely there. When you try and catch it, man, it is really very, very difficult. Better luck next time.

00:49:18 Speaker_01
Presumably, the ancestor to modern dragonflies was probably not a very good flyer, we think, just based on its wing shape, size, and the wing venation patterns that we see. But then over time, dragonfly flight got quite good.

00:49:33 Speaker_01
And we think that some of the selection probably was because initially there was nothing in the sky except for odonate-like things, right?

00:49:40 Speaker_01
But as the sky started to fill up with species, and there was birds and frogs and pterosaurs and things like that,

00:49:47 Speaker_01
There would have been selection on them to be able to maneuver very well, but there would have also been selection to kind of have optimized, you know, speed and performance.

00:49:54 Speaker_01
And so part of what we see in the, when you look at the dragonfly wing, the wing venation is very noticeable, right? Something that people notice. Tiffany made those Tiffany lamps based on dragonfly wings, right?

00:50:06 Speaker_01
But the more dense the wing veins are, the stiffer the wing is, and the sparser the wing veins are, the more bendy it is.

00:50:13 Speaker_01
But there's also a bunch of this tissue called resaline, which is a really spongy tissue that makes it kind of has elastic properties. There's small spines and hairs that kind of are different parts of the wings to add more rigidity or less rigidity.

00:50:26 Speaker_01
There's this thing called the terastigma, which is this small little dot of color at the tip of the wing, which we think acts to kind of stabilize the main cord of the wing against vibrations during flight.

00:50:35 Speaker_01
It's kind of like a little counter leaper, like a little weight at the tip of the wing.

00:50:39 Speaker_03
So that's what those dragonfly dots are for. And Dr. Ware says that they have two sets of wings, one in front, one in back, the forewing, and one's the hindwing.

00:50:47 Speaker_03
And how wind passes over the forewing, depending on its angle, affects also obviously how the air moves over the hindwing, which gives them such control, and that allows them to glide, to fly backwards, and to attain hunting speeds up to 35 miles per hour, or 55 kilometers an hour.

00:51:08 Speaker_03
You are so lucky you're too big for them.

00:51:11 Speaker_01
So that all of that has been optimized by natural selection really to kind of move air in a certain way to kind of maintain lift and decrease drag and energy expenditure.

00:51:21 Speaker_03
Patrons Susan Singley, Chrysalis Ashton, Lexi Cable, Patricia Evans, Paige, Floor, Boerwinkle, Lena Carpenter, and Genevieve Bertrand had evolutionary inquiries.

00:51:32 Speaker_03
People are talking about movies where dinosaurs hanging out with like dragon-sized dragonflies.

00:51:38 Speaker_01
True, false. Well, I mean, everyone wants to talk about dinosaurs being around for a long time, but they're like a blip compared to dragonflies and nemlifes, because dragonflies and nemlifes are very old, right?

00:51:48 Speaker_01
So these griffon flies were flying in the Carboniferous, so 350 million years ago. So this is before T-Rex and all these things that you see with dragonflies flying around. There certainly were dragonflies.

00:51:59 Speaker_01
For as long as there were dinosaurs, there were dragonflies, with a couple of exceptions. For modern dragonflies, if we date them to be around 225, 230 million years old, There were some small little wee dinosaur.

00:52:12 Speaker_01
proto dinosaurs that were kind of coming up then, but in general, like the carboniferous flying griffin flies would have been around and they're like, each wing was about 37 centimeters.

00:52:21 Speaker_01
So maybe 70 centimeters, about two feet wide, you know, so they're, they're, I don't, I mean, that probably looked like a dragon when it was in the sky.

00:52:30 Speaker_01
I mean, that's pretty big, but it's not the size of a Komodo dragon, certainly not, but they were definitely around as you see that kind of rise of reptiles, right?

00:52:38 Speaker_01
The age of reptiles, as that was kind of starting to happen, they would have already been, these odonates or proto-odonates in the sky.

00:52:45 Speaker_03
What sound do you think that would make?

00:52:48 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, so the sound of dragonfly wings is so interesting, right?

00:52:53 Speaker_01
And there actually are these kind of like spines and ridges on what they call the leading edge of the wing that some people have said for Pantelothevesins, this wandering glider, actually some of those ridges and spines are to decrease the amount of sound that they make so that way they can avoid being heard by predators and sneak up on their prey more easily.

00:53:12 Speaker_01
But dragonfly wings are like, if you, I used to have one on my desk actually, but you can, if you ruffle them, they definitely make a noise most definitely, but I think they would be selected to try and make as little sound as possible, right, if they're going about their business.

00:53:26 Speaker_03
A few patrons, including Colby Evans, Carol Young, Devin, and Curtis Takahashi, who wanted to know, in Curtis's words, where on the food chain are they? Who eats them? Do bats eat them? Birds eat them? Apparently they're delicious, right?

00:53:38 Speaker_03
They could be delicious.

00:53:40 Speaker_01
Bats eat them. Birds eat them. Lizards eat them. Frogs eat them. Fish eat them. Mammals eat them. We eat them. Humans eat them. Not just me, but many, many cultures of people that eat insects eat dragonflies.

00:53:54 Speaker_01
So yeah, I think they're really a very common, good source of protein.

00:53:59 Speaker_03
This is a very informed question from Rich Thomas Simpson. He said, if we puny humans have three options in our eyes, RGB, Do we have any idea what the dragonflies have that a whopping 30 different visual options use them for?

00:54:13 Speaker_03
Seems like overkill, aside from seeing a wider spectrum. What more are they getting? Are they seeing sounds? Can they see the future? Can they see who views their TikToks? What's going on?

00:54:22 Speaker_03
Okay, so just a quick side note, an opsin is a protein that binds to light-reactive receptors, which underlie vision.

00:54:30 Speaker_03
Humans have three cone-type cells that help us see color, and rod cells help us detect light, and for more on this in a lot of detail, we have a whole ophthalmology episode that's great. It's all about eyes. But yeah, back to dragonflies.

00:54:43 Speaker_03
Do they have ten times the opsins that we do?

00:54:48 Speaker_01
So they have a lot of opsins and there's been a lot of expansions in kind of like whole families of whole different kinds of opsins.

00:54:56 Speaker_01
Yeah, I don't know that it's overkill because there is a lot of color and they're using, my guy, they're using this to communicate, right?

00:55:03 Speaker_01
So males are communicating with males, males are communicating with females, they're doing it for species recognition. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why selection would have maybe acted on this.

00:55:12 Speaker_01
And we do see slight variation in opsins, for example, in the things that fly at night versus the things that are diurnal. So I think that if you look across the amount of color that you see in Odinates, it's huge.

00:55:23 Speaker_01
And the families that have the most range of color are also the families that are the most species rich. And Ryo Fudahashi, Seth Bybee, there's a few labs that have worked especially like in a lot of detail on opsins.

00:55:35 Speaker_01
I think what the conclusion is, is that color is like a really important part of the story of the evolution of Odinates. And so we, of course, we might expect that their opsins are part of that story too.

00:55:47 Speaker_03
What about their brains? A few people wanted to know. Flora Boerwinkle, Dave Cannon, Tanya Magic Fingers wanted to know, what's their brain situation like in Flora's words?

00:55:59 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, I guess they can do a lot with what they have. So, like I mentioned, they're able to do interception-style predation, which is pretty remarkable.

00:56:08 Speaker_01
That's what lions do, and they're able to do that with a relatively small number of descending interneurons.

00:56:14 Speaker_03
So this is when a predator tracks its prey and guesses where it's going to go next and then heads that way to intercept it and catch it. So they're doing some insect physics and math up there.

00:56:24 Speaker_01
But they have like optic lobes, they have a mushroom body, which is where we think there's a lot of memory, where the memory storage happens in odonates. But like all insects, they basically have kind of

00:56:36 Speaker_01
It's more like clusters of ganglia, you know, that we're working with. We're not talking about a centralized brain per se.

00:56:42 Speaker_01
I mean, they do have a tentorum, they do have in their head, they do have these big major lobes and they do have this mushroom body and nerves that descend from the head. But I wouldn't think of it like a mammal brain.

00:56:53 Speaker_01
Just think of it more like, you know, these clusters of ganglia that work together for sensory input.

00:56:58 Speaker_03
So them's got brains, they got small ones, they got brains though. Patron Keely Chavez submitted an audio question via Patreon.

00:57:05 Speaker_00
Hi Ellie, Keely Chavez. This may be my favorite ology ever. Wondering why there are so many color morphs of different species makes it really hard to pick out the right one on iNaturalist.

00:57:21 Speaker_03
Thanks. Do you have any tips for people who are out dragonfly spotting and how to identify different dragonflies?

00:57:30 Speaker_01
That's a tough one for sure. There are a lot of good field guides out there.

00:57:35 Speaker_01
So give like props to Nothing Beats a Book, you know, having a book in your hand, because they could do kind of break down the color plus winged venation or a head or other features that you should look for. Because sometimes color can be misleading.

00:57:49 Speaker_01
Like I mentioned, the Eastern Pond Hawk is green except for when it's not, when it's a male, it's old, it's blue, you know.

00:57:55 Speaker_01
There are also some damselflies where there's males that are a certain color, there's females that are a certain color, and then there's females that kind of change their color to look like males to avoid sexual harassment.

00:58:05 Speaker_03
literally like in drag or like traveling solo wearing a full gluon beard. Just leave me alone. And you know what else is fun?

00:58:14 Speaker_03
The paper Faking Death to Avoid Male Coercion, Extreme Sexual Conflict Resolution in a Dragonfly, which describes the Moorland Hawker Dragonfly who deposits her eggs

00:58:25 Speaker_03
flies away, and if trailed by a male, she crashes dramatically into vegetation, she lies motionless upside down for as long as it takes, and then when the coast is clear, she gets on her merry way. She's like, later sucker.

00:58:38 Speaker_01
So those can make it very complicated.

00:58:40 Speaker_01
So for damselflies, for that reason, for those of us like myself who are more studying dragonflies, I often think, oh, geez, it's just a lot of small blue things for damselflies, because that's a lot of what they are, like a lot of small blue things that are kind of hard to tell apart.

00:58:55 Speaker_01
Often what you want to look for, for damselflies, for species, or even sometimes the genera, is you want to look at the anal, what they call the anal appendages, these claspers that males use.

00:59:05 Speaker_01
And you need to have a hand lens or like a jeweler's loop that you can look at them. And the shape of them are very distinctive, right? So those can be diagnostic, but sometimes

00:59:14 Speaker_01
I would say that it's very hard to take a picture of that for iNaturalist, you know what I mean? And so if you're using iNaturalist only, you would miss those characters and those characters will probably really help you get to the species ID.

00:59:25 Speaker_01
So I would say if you can get like a small magnifying glass or something to take with you when you're looking at it and look at the bum, look at the tail end, look at the tip of the abdomen, that will allow you to kind of look at the overall shape.

00:59:38 Speaker_01
Sometimes they're notched, sometimes they're hooked, sometimes a little tooth on the anal appendages. And those things are really important diagnostic characters.

00:59:46 Speaker_03
So damselflies, you gotta really get up in there. Dragonflies, it's a little more casual.

00:59:51 Speaker_01
For dragonflies, often you can look at the wing venation and you don't need to do anything fancy, you know, just hold the dragonfly in your hand and look at the, I hold them by the wings and then just look at the wing venation and all skimmers have a shape that looks like a foot in their wings.

01:00:06 Speaker_01
So the wing venation actually informs the shape of like a little knee, a shin, a toe, a heel, you know, and then a calf. So you get used to the patterns of things so that when in doubt with the color, that can be your backup.

01:00:22 Speaker_03
Nice. So get into that Venetian. Venetian's where it's at. Don't get a tattoo with the wrong Venetian. Don't do it. Last question from listeners, and I'm glad they asked this because same, same.

01:00:35 Speaker_03
Chelsea Awick, a lot of people, by the way, just said they're very stoked about this. Emi the Stranger said, Dragonflies are fairies. Prove me wrong, Ali. Edith wanted to know, they see magic. Are they magic?

01:00:46 Speaker_03
Emily Stauffer said, When I was little, I was told it's good luck when lands on you. That's definitely true. Right. Some people asked, Amanda loves Kurt and Chelsea Wilk. also asked about people passing away.

01:00:57 Speaker_03
Amanda says, I've often heard it said that dragonflies are signs from loved ones who have passed on. Where did the symbolism come from?

01:01:04 Speaker_03
And I thought this was a great question from Kate, first time question asker, said, is there any lore around them that might be linked to some behavior or a historic event? It feels like they have symbolic meaning across cultures.

01:01:14 Speaker_03
They do seem a little magical. And Kate is a first time question asker and a biology student in Miami University's Project Dragonfly program.

01:01:23 Speaker_01
Ah, odontologist, I can't wait to see you at the next Dragonfly Society or World Dragonfly Meeting. Well, this is what I would say is that for as long as there, I mean, humans were a very short footnote in the story of dragonflies, right?

01:01:37 Speaker_01
So we've never been in a world where there wasn't dragonflies, right? So humans as such have evolved with dragonflies always present. So depending on which part of the world you're in, there's a lot of cultural significance for dragonflies.

01:01:51 Speaker_01
Sometimes there's negative connotations, sometimes positive, and it really varies with kind of culture. My grandmother is British. She's from Yorkshire. So she taught me that if you fall asleep next to the water, darners, those H nids,

01:02:06 Speaker_01
that they would sew your lips shut, right? That does not happen. They do not do that, but it's because people saw the ovipositor and they thought it was like a darning needle, right? So I would count that as a negative association, right?

01:02:19 Speaker_01
But then I have heard from lots of people that they feel like they're a good sign, that it's a sign of a loved one who's passed away. I have heard that before.

01:02:27 Speaker_03
And for a deep dive, you can always see the delightful study, Insect Myths, an Interdisciplinary Approach Fostering Active Learning in the journal American Entomologist, which cites the Zuni tribe of what is now New Mexico as the origin of the folklore that dragonflies are a messenger between God and humans.

01:02:45 Speaker_03
But the Dine people, often called or once called the Navajo, had associations with dragonflies signifying balance in life. Like most things, especially bugs, their value depends on who you ask, really.

01:03:00 Speaker_01
In some cultures, they're considered to be very good luck. In other cultures, there's a story in East Asia where if they get caught in your hair, that it's a sign that mental illness is coming. That would be an example of a negative one.

01:03:13 Speaker_01
But then there's examples from ancient Japanese texts of an emperor that was bit by a horsefly, and a dragonfly came and ate the horsefly, because they do eat horseflies. And so one of the names for the islands of Japan was Island of Dragonflies.

01:03:26 Speaker_01
And some of the samurai armature actually had on their helmets had dragonflies on them and had dragonflies kind of etched in some of the armor that they wore because they were considered incredible predators and really good successful hunters, right?

01:03:39 Speaker_01
That would be a positive connotation. So I feel like it really varies probably through space and time, right? What people have thought about dragonflies. I like to think that they're good luck.

01:03:50 Speaker_01
I mean, at the very least, they can be good harbingers of what's happening in the environment, right?

01:03:55 Speaker_01
Like there's a red one that comes around in North America in like the autumn, and it's called Sympetrum, Petra, because it perches often on rocks and things like that. And if you see that, you know autumn is coming, right?

01:04:07 Speaker_01
There's Annex Junius is one of the first ones to fly. If you see it, you know spring is here. So you can kind of use those as good markers. So you weren't able to tell the seasons any other way. You could use dragonflies for sure.

01:04:19 Speaker_01
Plus, you know that there's fresh water nearby. If you see dragonflies and damselflies, probably there's water.

01:04:24 Speaker_01
pretty close by and it might very well be clean with the asterisk that there are some dragonflies and damselflies that are not very picky and they'll be in swill.

01:04:33 Speaker_01
But there's a lot that really like fresh water that is clean and that could be a good sign too.

01:04:38 Speaker_03
And do dragonflies bite? You mentioned horsefly biting. Do dragonflies, do they bite people? Patrons Chuck Miriam, Han the Bee, Heather Crane, Flora and the Fawn, and Amanda Loves Kurt needed to know this.

01:04:49 Speaker_03
And The Wren You Know had the statement, I just came here to say that dragonfly nyads plague my nightmares. And when I was a kid, I saw one eating a pollywog. So no offense, but what the fuck? Hashtag ugly baby.

01:05:01 Speaker_03
Mish the fish also told the tale that when I was like 10 at summer camp, this dragonfly made its way over to us and one of the kids flipped out. She was so scared, which only made the dragonfly more attracted to her. Why? Why are people afraid of them?

01:05:14 Speaker_03
And Sophie asked, am I right to be afraid of them? I feel like they bite, but I think I'm wrong.

01:05:19 Speaker_01
They don't. I mean, if I picked up a dragonfly and held it close to me, then it will use its mouthparts and try and be like, what's going on?

01:05:28 Speaker_01
And sometimes it feels like a pinch, but it's not because it's trying to bite me, because it can't eat me and it won't try and eat me.

01:05:34 Speaker_01
Its mouthparts kind of fit together, and then the mandibles are on the inside, and it would be very ineffective to try and eat me.

01:05:40 Speaker_00
You don't want this.

01:05:41 Speaker_01
But sometimes they'll do that just to try and get away, right? And so some people will say, oh, I was bit by a dragonfly. And I say, what were you doing? So, well, I picked it up. I'm like, well, then there you go.

01:05:50 Speaker_01
It's not biting you, it's just trying to get away, right? I don't think that counts. I mean, they don't come to you like, oh, I want to try and bite that human. They would never do that.

01:05:57 Speaker_01
It would be only if you happened to pick it up and you were holding it and it was getting perturbed. Then they'll try and like, ah, like, let me go.

01:06:06 Speaker_03
And I said I would get to this, but how are we doing? How are they doing? Matt Sicotta wants to know, how can we protect them? Bonnie Rutherford want to know if mosquito dunks harm dragonfly and damselfly larva in essentially like, how are they doing?

01:06:22 Speaker_01
So like all insects, we think that they're probably facing an insect decline, right? And the insect decline that we're seeing is like higher rate than we've ever seen in the history that humans have been keeping records.

01:06:34 Speaker_01
So we should be, if you like wondering how concerned should you be, I would say gravely, incredibly, intensely concerned, right? What we don't know is whether or not the pattern is

01:06:47 Speaker_01
the same in the Arctic or in the temperate regions or in the tropic regions for dragonflies and damselflies.

01:06:51 Speaker_01
There were some early reports that maybe because we actually had done an okay job putting regulations for fresh water in some parts of the world, that maybe they actually were doing better now than they were in the 70s, for example.

01:07:03 Speaker_01
But whether or not that means they're doing as well as they were in 1900 or pre-industrial revolution, probably not. What we know is that populations are changing in terms of their geographic distribution.

01:07:14 Speaker_01
Things that used to only be found, for example, Anaxanthoridae was found in southern Europe, northern Africa, and now it's established in Sweden. So they're expanding their ranges.

01:07:24 Speaker_01
What that means for the taxa in the Arctic, whether they're going to be outcompeted, we don't know. We know that they need fresh water, right?

01:07:31 Speaker_01
So as you lose fresh water, that's a risk, of course, for dragonflies and nebulae, because they cannot breed in saltwater. They need fresh water. And as we pollute, you know, we continue to pollute and change and divert water.

01:07:44 Speaker_01
That's a big part of what humans do. We seem to not realize that we have very, very little fresh water on this earth and all life depends on it. Like every single living thing depends on fresh water and we have almost none of it.

01:07:58 Speaker_01
Almost none of it is fresh. Almost all of it is salt, right? So we really need this precious resource. And dragonflies and damselflies really need this precious resource. But we treat it like it's renewable, like there's an unlimited amount.

01:08:13 Speaker_01
And there really is not. So that's something to say. Yeah, you should probably be very worried. And they need our help, just like all insects need our help, but freshwater insects in particular, because without freshwater, they're not able to breed.

01:08:28 Speaker_01
Right? That's it. Populations. Game over, as you know, people would say. So building freshwater sources can be important. You know, having a water feature in your yard can be important.

01:08:38 Speaker_01
I don't mean like a tub that breeds a bunch of mosquitoes that only one or two dragonflies can be in, because that's not really what we're looking for. But like an actual, like a pond, like people can build like water features of little ponds

01:08:50 Speaker_01
in their yard, that can be really helpful. Voting for people who care about fresh water, whether even your town council, I mean, often people think that it's a national issue and not a local issue. It's absolutely a local issue.

01:09:01 Speaker_01
You probably have fresh water within a few blocks of where you live, whether you live in an urban setting or in a rural setting. And so voting for people who are going to protect that fresh water is really important. That has a really big impact.

01:09:14 Speaker_01
And I think that in general, just getting people to realize that freshwater insects are important food for everything, right? For birds, for fish, for frogs. We kind of really need them more than I think people realize.

01:09:26 Speaker_03
What's the hardest thing about being a dragonfly expert?

01:09:29 Speaker_01
Um, that's a good question. I don't think there's much that's hard about it. It's kind of a blessed life.

01:09:35 Speaker_01
Um, and if anybody complains about this job, I promise you probably they go to bed with a smile on their face and they're just doing it performatively because academics feel like they have to complain.

01:09:45 Speaker_01
There's not a lot of bad things being an odontologist, you know, I mean, you get to be outside. it's a hot day, you're near fresh water, which means you're guaranteed to go for a swim.

01:09:54 Speaker_01
The dragonfly community has this thing where we often go and get ice cream after you do collecting. It's like a thing that dragonfly people do. So there's usually almost always ice cream. There's a lot of cool questions that are not yet to be answered.

01:10:06 Speaker_01
There's a lot of room for discovery. The collaboration between people, whether you're from Nigeria or Guyana or Japan or or Northern Canada, there's room for collaboration with everybody.

01:10:18 Speaker_01
And people, I think, are really good team builders in this business, compared to other insect groups that I've worked on, where it was very competitive. Dragonflies does not seem like that.

01:10:28 Speaker_01
So if someone told me this was a tough job, I would probably be like, really? Real talk. Be honest with me. And then they, I'm sure, would be like, yeah, you're right. This is a pretty good job.

01:10:40 Speaker_03
Do you have a favorite aspect of it? Do you love fieldwork, like early morning fieldwork days? Or do you love getting back and getting data crunched? Is there a part that you love the most?

01:10:52 Speaker_01
I really do like it all. I really love doing fieldwork. I love being out at fresh water. I mean, that was kind of what got me interested in it anyways, was just being near the lake all the time, seeing dragonflies land.

01:11:02 Speaker_01
And that part is still just like what fieldwork is. But sometimes it's very cold. We were in the Arctic last October drilling you know, cutting holes in ice at minus, you know, 30 degrees or something like that.

01:11:14 Speaker_01
And there were times when it didn't feel as fun, but it was still fun. You know what I mean? Like even like the base level of like, oh, I'm not sure. It's still like stratospheres above any job I've ever had in terms of enjoyment.

01:11:26 Speaker_01
But even like aligning DNA is fun. Looking at their genitals under the microscope was fun. Making the phylogeny is fun. Working with collaborators. you know, is fun. So I think the whole shebang, it's a pretty great job.

01:11:38 Speaker_01
I feel so lucky that I get to do it. Thank you so much for talking to me about dragonflies for so long. I'm so excited to talk to you. Thanks for inviting me.

01:11:48 Speaker_03
So ask some daring questions to delightful dragonfly experts because look at all we learned. And for more on Dr. Jessica Ware, please see her socials in the show notes and follow her. Tell her that she's awesome.

01:11:59 Speaker_03
And next time you see a dragonfly, tell it, hey, I know about you. I know about your butt and your eyes. I like you. Thank you for listening. We're at Ologies on Instagram and X. I'm at Allie Ward on both.

01:12:09 Speaker_03
We have swear-free episodes called Smallogies available for free. Just look for Smallogies at the link in the show notes or wherever you get podcasts. and subscribe, spread the word. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com.

01:12:20 Speaker_03
Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning the Ologies podcast Facebook group, and thank you Aveline Malik for making our professional transcripts. Thanks to Kelly Dwyer for making the website.

01:12:30 Speaker_03
Noelle Dilworth is our lovely scheduling producer and worked for years to schedule us. Susan Hale is a great friend and managing director of Ologies. Jake Chafee is an editor, always a very cheery help.

01:12:41 Speaker_03
and lead editor with astounding maneuverability herself is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and if you stick around to the end of the episode I tell you a secret today it's that it's 5.09 p.m. on November 5th.

01:12:54 Speaker_03
That's right I record these like at the last minute and it's election night in America. I'm in pajamas. I have not showered. I do not smell good and tomorrow's my

01:13:06 Speaker_03
frigging birthday and so tonight a few friends are coming by to watch the election results and have pizza. I'm not doing great. Tuesdays are already a sprint to the finish.

01:13:16 Speaker_03
Birthdays are weird because everyone's nice to you and you're like, ah, it's too much. And election days are just white knuckle shit shows. And my intestines, people are a pretzel. My hands are like a virgin on a homecoming date.

01:13:31 Speaker_03
I'm just sending this out saying, hey man, let's bend time and space with our minds and let's hope for the best, America. I believe in you. Get it together. Do better from here on out on a lot of things. So love y'all. Okay, off to shower, bye bye.

01:13:52 Speaker_02
It's almost like you're the dragonfly.