Greetings Homo Sapiens!



Hi, my name is Eric and I am a Dragonfly. I am going to tell you about Dragonflies. The first thing you want to know about Dragonflies is that we are fabulous and kind creatures and get along with each other very well, unlike humans. I mean humans, come on, what a stupid name! Anyway, we are large insects with large wings. We have long slender bodies which help us fly. We have 30000 separate lenses in each eye which make us the insects with the sharpest vision where as humans have only one lens. What weak eyesight humans have! Good thing is that we don’t have to go to the opticians. We can see something that is stationary, from almost 2 m away, and something that is moving, 2 to 3 time further away. We are the fastest insect in the world. We can fly backward also. We can also hover in mid air. We can camouflage and employ an optical illusion, also known as Motion camouflage. We Dragonflies can travel up to 137km in one day. I remember trying to keep up with my family when we were hunting last week. So there, beat that, humans.

The Looks count too!


We come in many different shapes and sizes, but we are usually large compared to other insects. We not only come in red, fuchsia, orange, pink, blue, gold, saffron, black, emerald, maroon, and earth tones, but we also come in metallic colors. We usually have clear and transparent wings, but we can have different colored wings too. I have blue wings but my siblings have different colored wings. We don’t sting or bite, because as I said earlier, we are fabulous and kind creatures. But if we are treated wrong we do bite. We have mouths which are shaped to bite. We don’t have any stingers. If I did, the first person whom I would sting would be my brother Tommy. He teases me every day. Anyway, we have bodies made up of three sections: the head, the thorax or middle section and the abdomen or the rear. We have a long slender body built for hunting and flying. Our eyes and jaws are located in our head. Our wings and legs are attached to the middle section. The abdomen helps to balance and steer us in the air. We Dragonflies have amazing bodies.

Dragons and Damsels


If there’s one thing I hate, that’s “Damsels”! Those guys copy everything from us. I wish if I could teach them a lesson, but my parents said that they are nice delicate creatures who are our cousins. I mean come on, there eyes are smaller and set wide apart, there flight is weak, there landing sucks, and there are so ugly. My parents call them delicate creatures and our cousins. They are nothing like us, or are they?

Meet our ancestors


We Dragonflies are one of the oldest land animals in the world. We have lived for a staggering 300 million years. Compared to humans, we are certainly very old. My ancestors were giants but we Dragonflies are much smaller now-a-days. The largest Dragonfly ever found is a fossil of an extinct Prodonata (Meganeura) and that’s my ancestor. The smallest is the Labelloid Dragonflies.

Let’s go Swimming


My mother told me how I was born. She said I was a small egg as small as a period at the end of this sentence you are reading. My egg was laid on a water plant. I didn’t have a name yet. So my family called me Larvae #7 because I had other siblings too. Baby Dragonflies are called larvae. I looked very funny. I lived in water. I can remember my first swimming lesson. My swimming instructor said that I was born to swim. My mother said that a fish ate one of my brothers. Just this very thought gives me shivers. I took 5 years to grow.

Yum! That’s was delicious!




We Dragonflies eat small flying insects like mosquitoes and flies. We usually hunt in sunny days. There are some animals we are scared of, like birds, especially the: sparrows and the kingbirds. We are also scared of the frogs. They are creepy with there slimy tongue. I remember last week when I was enjoying fresh air, when a bird started chasing me. I got rid of it by quickly dodging between the tree branches.

No place like home!


We live in the places where we can hunt and where there’s lots of freshwater. We live in places like ponds, lakes, streams and wetlands because that’s where larvae can live. We have to take care of the larvae. Our biome is the pond and my habitat is the pond.

We play an important role


We play a very important role because we have aquatic larvae which rely on fresh water which they can be used to make rapid assessments of water quality and indicate a healthy ecosystem. We also eat dangerous insects like mosquitoes. What the all humans can do is pollute the air. That’s their way of playing an important role!

Are you threatening us!



Over the last 40 years, humans have made over 3 kinds of dragonfly species’ extinct by: habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, inappropriate habitat management, alteration of site hydrology and the impacts of global climate change. So, for the sake of the earth, stop harming the world!

Insult Dragonflies and we’ll insult you!



Some people don’t just know what we Dragonflies can do or how important we are, so they start insulting us. You know what I mean. Take the British for an example, they call us:

Horse Adders

Devil’s Darning Needles

Snake Doctors and

Horse Stingers

So we call them back, by calling them:

Giant Sapiens

Humongosaurus



No winged idiots

Puny legs and


Darned morons


Wonderful Japanese

There are some people who respect the Dragonflies, such as Japanese. Those are the people whom we treat nicely. We also show them neat tricks. It is one of the emblems of the emperor and a spirit which transports the spirits of Dead Ancestors. 私達はイギリスより日本のよいの好む (I just said “we like the Japanese better than the British”, in Japanese).
Facts
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Dragonflies can fly over still water or nature’s wildest places
•
Dragonflies can reach speeds of almost 100kph.
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There are over 5000 described species of Dragonflies
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Dragonflies are predators who are called “Mosquito Hawks”, because they help eat dangerous insects like the mosquitoes
•
Dragonflies can hover in mid air
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Dragonflies belong to the:
•
Kingdom- Animalia
•
Phylum- Arthopoda

Class-
Insecta

Biome-
Pond


Well, that’s all I had to say about us, the dragonflies. If you want to find out more on dragonflies, you can find on the internet and do remember one thing that, if you see a dragonfly nearby your house, don’t try to touch it or harm it. We are ferocious predators!