• shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    215·
    16 days ago

    ahem

    I LOVE dragonflies! Getting my first tat of one!

    If a dragonfly locks onto your happy ass, you’re meat. 95-97% hunt success ratio, highest of any animal on the planet. One shot, one kill. Strongest flying insect, with 4 independently operating wings. Watch one fly in slow mo. That is what Herbert had in mind when he wrote ornithopters into Dune. Your inner ear would boil if you could shuck and jive like that. They don’t chase prey, they intercept prey. They aim for where the target is going to be. Their head is basically a giant, binocular eyeball, a 360° target-seeking combat package. Yeah, you read that right, 360° field of view. If you think you’re sneaking up behind one, it’s already seen you.

    They do love them some mosquitoes, that’s a fact. Not going to say our swampland in the boonies is mosquito free, but it’s a swamp, it’s loaded with dragonflies, and there ain’t many blood suckers around. There’s another swamp down the street where they fly non-stop mosquito interdiction. Plenty of bugs on the shoreline but paddle out 20’, you’re free and clear. My boys rule the airspace over water.

    Anything smaller, which is to say, everyone else, is fair dinkums. They’ll start horking down on what ever part first meets those monstrous jaws, alive or dead, no matter. Every watched one feed? Not for the faint of heart. Whatever space isn’t taken by eyeballs, the rest is all mouth. Those jaws work as implacable, squared-off, champing vices. Pray they start with your head, because starting at your feet is all the same to them. Crazy nastyass dragonfly, dragonfly don’t care, dragonfly don’t give a shit.

    The dragonfly you see is the adult, and adulthood is only a month of their lives. Before they begin ravaging the skies, they spend up to 2-years as nymphs, terrors of the sea, two full years of underwater murder practice before they get their wings. If you have the misfortune to share that environment, the pond is dark and full of terrors. They go straight from nymph to adult, pupation is for lesser arthropods like those pansy-ass butterflies, or, as the dragonfly sees 'em, “food”.

    Want to “pet” one? Hold very still, fully extend your arm and point your finger, they’ll eventually use you as a helipad. Know any other insect that will do that? You can walk around with 'em, make finger guns, whatever, they’ll hang. Like a dragonfly has anything to fear from us lowly primates. Woman across the street is a got damned dragonfly whisperer, got a dozen pics of her holding them. Here’s one chillin’ on my wife, rode half a mile upstream with us, our very own combat air patrol.

    Notice Stephen King has never written about these monsters? Too scary. Chuck Norris crosses the street. Such perfect killers, evolution cranked out over 3,000 versions. There’s one species down here that’s coal black. Black eyeballs, black head, black thorax, black abdomen, black wing veins, one of the smaller models, think Kiowa helichopper vs. Hind. We got tactical smart missiles, phased plasma pulse rifles, RPGs, we got sonic electronic ball breakers! We got nukes, we got knives, sharp sticks… we got dragonflies!

    And no, do not dare confuse them with the lesser damselflies. I mean, look at this idiot, eyeballs all stickin’ out. Unlike the majestic dragonfly who rests with spread wings, prepared for instant combat, the damselfly folds up. Lazy little nitwits.

    Want some? I buried an old trash can, filled it with water and plants from the local creek. Stole some pitcher plants and sundews as well, even my plants eat bugs. Had dragons in less than a week. We have two smaller “ponds” taking off nicely. Between the goldfish and newly imported dragonflies, mosquito larvae don’t stand a hope in hell. Given their long underwater larval stage, I’m hoping to have my own air force two years from now.

    “Dragon”, it’s right there in the name.

    Anyway, I think they’re kinda cool. Maybe we can talk about hummingbirds next? Anything but “cute”, they’re the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered bird you ever set eyes on.

    • dave@feddit.ukEnglish
      39·
      16 days ago

      They are super cool and super territorial by all accounts. We were in a pop-up pub in a field and this guy kept coming to sit on our hands. I guess we were in his spot…Common Darter

    • xthexder@l.sw0.comEnglish
      30·
      16 days ago

      I think Dragonflies are pretty cool too. Thanks for the fun facts!

      In return, here is the best dragonfly photo I have taken to date.

      • Annoyed_🦀 🏅@monyet.ccEnglish
        19·
        16 days ago

        Anything that move and smaller than them, even fish, as they’re ambush predator, by launching their dino-grabber-like mouth part to grab their prey and send it right into their mouth. They also have jet butt. If the adult is the airforce, the nymph is the navy.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayEnglish
      10·
      16 days ago

      That was absolutely glorious and insanely witty. I’ve been called witty before and this had me feeling joyfully outclassed. I thought I was in for some crazy copy pasta but it just ended up further educating me on WHY dragonflies are so cool.

      (And yeah damselflies, psh. Bugs. Seeing a dragonfly is a GOOD day.)

      I hope this becomes a copy pasta. It was legit hilarious and awesome to read.

      Dang it I’m really hoping you’re having like *a really good day. * Thanks for writing this. :D

    • SinkingLotus @lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      17 days ago

      Sounds like you might be interested in reading a manhwa called “Jungle Juice”.

      A bug killer spray called “Jungle Juice” is being sold. After using the spray, they gain a “complex”, which essentially turns them into at a human-bug hybrid with whatever they killed. The main character killed a Golden-ringed Dragonfly.

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      You’re the person that makes me exhale In relief when i am at social gathering with an uncomfortable amount of people around.

    • 5too@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      …I would be very interested in seeing how you describe your hummingbirds!

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      29·
      16 days ago

      Water is the answer my friend.

      Never had them in my yard, not that I noticed anyway. Buried an old trash can for a water feature. Bam. Dragonflies.

      I have 3 other ponds. One is a $25 Home Depot pond and the other is a thrift-store witch’s cauldron. They all have a couple of goldfish in them, native water plants, and the trash can pond has a solar cell running a 12V water pump.

  • drolex@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    461·
    17 days ago

    Predating dinosaurs: as in ‘predators’ or ‘pre-dating’?

    I’m scared.

  • Diddlydee@feddit.ukEnglish
    45·
    17 days ago

    They are also the most successful hunters in the animal kingdom with a ~97% success rate. They don’t know trigonometry, but their brains allow them to calculate where their prey will be and they intercept it.

  • SanndyTheManndy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    16 days ago

    I get a metric fuckton of them during the rainy season. Swarms of dragonflies. Needless to say, I do not have a mosquito problem.

    • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      14·
      17 days ago

      Hey I was gonna say that

      To scrollers: this is a recent video by AlphaPhoenix where he captures slow-motion footage of dragonflies. Some amazing shots in there. Well, one at least.

  • UraniumBlazer@lemm.eeEnglish
    18·
    17 days ago

    Serious question: Has any culture tried breeding these guys to keep mosquitoes at bay? Something like how people kept cats around to reduce the population of mice?

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      16 days ago

      Interesting question! I’d guess, however you do it, you could only achieve a temporary uptick in the population. Like any other predator/prey relationship, the ecosystem can only support X predators. After all, the ancient Egyptians could only have so many cats around until they ran out of mice.

      Be a pain to breed. They stay underwater as nymphs for 2 years, and that’s 2 years where you gotta keep them from being someone else’s lunch.

      • hakase@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        16 days ago

        Great question! The answer is that, well, you don’t, but that’s not what I’m intending unstained to mean here.

        As it turns out, “unstained” is structurally ambiguous, because English has two different “un-” prefixes, each of which has different functions and different category selection requirements.

        The first attaches to verbs, and means “reverse the action of”, e.g. un-tie, un-do, un-stain, etc. The second attaches to adjectives, and means “not X”, e.g. un-happy, un-satisfied, etc.

        So, if we want to form the word “undoable”, we can either take the verb “do” and attach “-able” first, giving us an adjective “doable” to which we can then add “un-” to give us “undoable”, an adjective meaning “not able to be done” (“Flying by flapping your arms is undoable”)
        OR
        We can take “do” and add the other “un-” first, giving us a verb “undo” meaning “to reverse the action of something” to which we can then add the suffix “-able”, giving us “undoable”, a different adjective meaning “able to be undone” (“Simple knots are easily undoable”)

        So, while both of these look and sound like the same word, they actually have different structures that correspond to the differences in their meanings.

        In my OP, you read “unstained” as “unstain-ed”, with “un-” attaching to “stain” to give a verb “unstain” meaning “to reverse the staining of”, and then added the participle suffix, while my intended structure was to attach “stain” and “-ed” first, giving a participle (adjective) “stained”, to which we can then add the other prefix “un-”, giving “un-stained” “not stained”.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayEnglish
      4·
      16 days ago

      Well the wing itself isn’t supposed to deform so we’re good! :P

      Seriously funny seeing this after trying repeatedly to retopologize simple objects, but making myself stick to quads to build the skills and “poly-perception”…It’s truly maddening and un-fun lol.

      Thanks for linking that site further down, by the way. :D

    • where_am_i@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      Turns out when you optimize something for millennia, the truly optimal solution is not a simple grid. That picture is essentially a proof that engineering will always be needed. Because any final solution is complex. Even if it’s parts are trivial.