 We have a few people two more coming in. Good evening. Can you hear me okay? Well, good. Welcome to our last of the three spring talks because of covid Ron Butler is going to give his talk by zoom, you can see he's got that ready to go. And I thank you all for coming out to hear that. So we have, we are working on talks for the fall. And some of the things we're thinking about is getting mark work risk back to talk about loons, give us an update on that. Also interested in lichens I don't know how many of you find lichens intriguing but we're thinking that might be kind of fun and maybe lichens mosses. So having stop Sally stock well come up and talk about where our birds winter, where they migrate to during the winter months so those are the things we're looking at right now. Dr Butler is a professor emeritus from umf. He's done a lot of things in the natural world I guess that's the best way to put it. A lot of citizen science projects which some of you may have been involved with with butterflies and other critters currently working on a book of butterfly identification, I believe. We thought that damsel flies and dragon flies were not things that people often talked about and it would be fun to really learn something about them. And Ron has agreed to do that for us so without further ado Ron. Take it away. Oh one other thing at the end. If you have questions what I'll do is come back up and take questions from the floor and then relay them to Ron. Okay. Good. Hopefully everybody can hear me. I don't know if you can see my face or not but Yeah, you're up there in the corner. Alrighty. I began my journey in biology actually studying mammals. I worked with deer and Canadian beavers and wild mice. And then switched my focus to seabirds and I spent a couple of decades working on seabirds, including two trips to Antarctica and several summers spent in Newfoundland. And it wasn't really until the mid 90s that I switched my focus to insects. And for the past two and a half decades I've basically helped coordinate several long term statewide citizen science initiatives dealing with important insect groups. The first of those was the main damsel fly and dragon fly survey that was followed of course by the main butterfly damsel fly survey. And then finally the main bumblebee atlas which just finished up a couple of years ago. We have finished a book describing the butterfly project, both in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes that set the publishers now and should be out next year. We're presently working on one similar to that on damsel flies and dragon flies. And we're still awaiting the final tallies of the bumblebee survey before we get started with compiling all that information that some of you probably helped collect. Tonight, our topic is dragon flies and damsel flies, the Odinata. This is a group that's near and dear to my heart probably my favorite group to work with. And we can find lots of historical references to dragon flies people have been attracted to them in one fashion or another. For centuries, literally. One of the earliest references I can find to dragon flies is their appearance on a late bronze age, about 15,000 years before the Christian era on a stone seal, something would be pressed into a clay. So, so something of this nature with a dragon fly emblem on it. The Japanese culture, there are lots of historical references to dragon flies in terms of haiku and other kinds of writings, and they were very popular of family crests. So for example, this is a suba the kind of the guard on a katana. And you see the dragon fly emblem here. And again on this medieval samurai dragon fly crest prominently displayed. And in Europe, we find really early references in the literature to dragon flies. If we look across the various nations of the world and see how they refer to dragon flies and in a common name sense, all sorts of interesting descriptors for this particular group of organisms. And many of them are sort of negative in their connotations. Devil's Needle, I Stinger, I Stitcher, Water Dipper, Horse Stinger. I know I grew up with my grandmother teaching me that they were all Darny Needles. So that was how I refer to them as a youngster growing up near the water. In terms of cultural perspectives, it really varies. So in Italy, dragon flies often had the reputation of being Satan's familiars, having been sent from hell. In Sweden, they were referred to as the devil's steel yard. That actually doesn't refer to a place where you make steel it refers to something you measure steel with. So if a dragon fly was flying around your head, it was weighing your soul and finding you wanting. I grew up with my grandmother telling me that Darny Needles would stitch the lips together of any little boys who told lies. It took me many years to outgrow that one. Other cultures have different perspectives on the Odinata. So I showed you the use of the crest in Japanese culture. But also there was an association with dragon flies being the harbinger of a good rice harvest. If we look at some indigenous peoples, they often associate spiritualistic traits to Odinata. So the Dakota, which is animals, considered them a symbol of water purity. And this is a Navajo sand painting of a dragon fly. The Tsunni, again, accorded them supernatural powers. And on Tahiti, dragon flies were seen as the familiars of Hiro, the god of the. So I guess the folklore was dragon flies would often buzz around your head to distract you while your house was actually being robbed. In terms of dragon flies in society, in a number of cultures, people eat them. Usually not the adults, it's usually the larvae that are eaten, and there are a variety of recipes in case you decide you want to try that. In other cultures, they have reported medicinal properties, headaches, indigestion, fever. Believe in Madagascar, the remedy for a headache is to catch a dragon fly and put it under your hat. And finally, decoration. A number of indigenous peoples, including the co-founder of Columbia, who's those dragon flies that have colored wings, the wings are often made into pins or other kinds of ornamentation. And of course, that same fascination with dragon flies and use of ornamentation carries over into contact versus. So I'm sure you've seen many, many kinds of uses of dragon flies in terms of names of boats and names of bars and all sorts of jewelry. And of course, the inevitable tattoos and copy cup. If I get one more dragon fly coffee cup from my relatives, I will be able to open up my own store. Well, if we look at insects and try to fathom the place of dragon flies in that big picture. What we find is insects and as it turns out may flies diverged very early from the main line of insect evolution. So these groups broke up very early continuing on into present times. So there's a very ancient group of insects, compared to some of our more numerous insects on the planet. The critter that is often represented as one of the first dragon flies is this critter. It's actually not a dragon fly. It's what we call a griffin fly. It belongs to the order Megan Asatra. This is not a, a, not the old nada. Okay, those are the damsel flies and dragon flies. This was kind of an evolutionary side branch, but clearly very similar in terms of its appearance it's external morphology to dragon flies today. The difference, of course, was its size. It was enormous. These griffin flies flew at a time in the Earth's history, when the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere was much higher, and would support the kind of tracheal respiratory system that all insects possess. So they were flying at a time and allowed them to approach these enormous sizes. Presently the oxygen concentration of our atmospheres lower and this size of an insect is not possible with that kind of respiratory system. It just doesn't supply the tissues wrap rapidly enough with oxygen at that kind of a body size. It's a pretty impressive bug. The upper carboniferous 325 million years ago or so. Note before the dinosaurs. The first real dragon flies. Appearance of 25 million years, roughly about 300 years ago. This particular fossil. It's really nice. And by the way, dragon flies don't fossilize very well in part because apparently with those wings they float. And that gives predators time to pull the carcasses apart or have them degrade before they make a nice fossil imprint like the one you have on the screen. But what you can see in this 300 million year old fossil is the resemblance to a contemporary species. It's a family company, commonly called the club tails. And again, if we look at some fossil dragon fly wings, look at the artist representation of what the fossil looks like, and then compare that to a contemporary dragon fly wing. The similarities are pretty pronounced. In fact, you can find some of the same veins in both the fossil forms, as well as the contemporary form. Recently, we find, you know, 125 million years ago. 25 million years ago in amber dams of flies and dragon flies that are almost identical to contemporary species, they're not the same species, but they're just really similar. So this is a spread wing, and you could not really discriminate that animal from the spread wings that fly around in Maine during the summertime. So again, really ancient insects. So, presently in this order of insects and Odinata refers to tooth, having to do with the impressive tooth like projections on the jaw like mandibles. There are about 60 flies and dragon flies. There are about 63, 6400 species. And I say about because new species are discovered, primarily in Asia on an annual basis so we always keep adding a few more now these are not evolving, that's people just didn't realize we had them. They're roughly divided into two sub-orders, roughly equally. The dragon flies proper, the anisoptera, and the damselflies, the zygoptera. So I sometimes get asked if the damselflies aren't just baby dragon flies and of course that's not the case with all adult insects. They're not as big as they're ever going to get when they finally emerge from the pupil casing or the last N-star development. So they don't actually get larger after that. There is one other small group of three species that sometimes in literature is represented as a distinct sub-order and other times as kind of in the anisoptera, the dragon flies. So you may see a reference to that on occasion, the anisoptera. Okay, and again this is three species. One of them may now be extinct. A very small group sort of has characteristics both damselflies and dragon flies. So taxonomically it's kind of still a distinct sub-order or not. So we'll start seeing the first dragon flies any day now. And it's always good to know how to distinguish between the two sub-orders. And so one easy way to do it is based on size. So generally, most damselflies are small with relatively thin abdomens compared to much larger dragon flies. Now there are some exceptions to this, I'll talk about that. The wings of dragon flies and damselflies are fundamentally different. Dragon fly wings are asymmetric. You can see this really clearly here with the four wings being longer and narrower and the hind wings being shorter and wider. Damselflies on the other hand have four wings that are basically the same shape. You can see that maybe you can't, but all four wings are to get folded together here. So wing shape is one character that works quite well. A real easy one is how they hold their wings. Dragon flies cannot fold their wings. So once the dragon fly emerges and hardens off, the wings basically stay out extended when at rest. While damselflies can actually fold their wings and generally do when they're perched over their abdomens. And this has to do with the way the wing articulates with the thorax and the angle of the thoracic segments. But when we look at dragon fly wings, we see that they're fairly broad across the joints that articulate with the thorax. Well, in damselfly wings, there's a petiole or neck, they come together in a very small area relative to the width of the wing. And that's not readily apparent when you look at them perched, but the fact that the wings are folded is related to that kind of wing structure. Dragon flies proportionally have larger eyes relative to the size of the head. In fact, dragon fly eyes are proportionally the largest eyes in the insect class. So by contrast, is the head of the damselfline. You can see the eyes are large, but not anywhere near as large as the dragon fly is proportional to the head. So those characteristics should allow you to separate pretty easily damselflies from dragon flies. I'll do not have a very complex life cycle, virtually all of them, few exceptions, have an aquatic larval form. And in fact, most of the lifespan of any damselfly or dragon fly is spent as an aquatic larva. So we technically call these larvae however in the older literature they're also referred to as nymphs and sometimes niads. But most of the literature first of these now as larvae larvae are pretty easy to discriminate to family based on their general appearance. So here are the families that we have in Maine, and you can see that each of them is pretty distinctive now giving species is a different story, but getting to families pretty easy. Similarly in the three damselfly families we have the larvae are quite distinct family wise, not so much when you try to do the larvae of all Odinates are generalist predators. And all of them have this really cool almost out of the movie aliens kind of mouth part as larvae that effectively looks like this. Okay, so the actual jaws of the animal are up here. Okay, and so while your jaws work like this remember insect jaws work like this. The head and the beginning of the thorax is this articulating what for a better term will call a lower lip. And this thing kept hint and underneath can shoot out in the length of the larvae and grab prey items as this hapless young minnow is just found out. So these guys are capable of actually their head actually is using this really remarkable appendage. Now this is lost in the adults the adults don't have this. This is only the larval form. And most of the life cycle of any given species is spent as an aquatic organism, and they go through multiple months differs depending upon the species on average probably about 12 growth months. So these insects are not truly metabolism like, for example, butterflies. They're what we call hemi metabolism, because with each growth mold, they begin to change subtly until they reach their final larval stage. And that's the larval stage, which will crawl out of the water and allow the terrestrial adult to emerge. And here's a sequence. The libellary with a glider doing exactly that. The animal crawls up and firmly attaches itself to the substrate now different species have different lengths legs, longer legs species tend to move farther from the water, short legged species sometimes just climb just barely out of the water. The larval casing ruptures down the dorsal part of the thorax, and the immature terrestrial adult emerges does a hand spring and regress its larval exoskeleton. And it's going to hold on to that to anchor itself as it begins to pump body fluids into its abdomen and into its wings to get them to spread out potentially into flight position before the animals able to fly away. This can take varying amounts of time from a few hours to most of a day, in part depending upon the species but also depending on how humid it is how dry it is whether it's windy and so forth. What's left over is this thing. This is the last exoskeleton of the last larval stage or we call and star. And this is referred to as an exobia. Sometimes people call them skins, sometimes husks. That's actually an exoskeleton, but this is this is what that the adult was wearing underwater for its last larval development stage. All of all insects are basically composed of three major sections the head, the thorax and the abdomen and dental flies and drug employees are no exception. Head is easily recognized. The abdomen starts here and has 10 sections. This is all abdomen. And the thorax is this part. And again in insects the thorax is kind of the locomotor unit. The legs and the wings that the insect has them and most sex do will be attached to the thorax. Vision of damsel flies and dragon flies is really quite remarkable. Dragon flies have on average 25 to 30,000 individual, what we call omatidia. They have these visual subunits that make up these compound eyes. You kind of see in this lower one, those individual subunits. Those individual subunits have all basically all the same components as your eye. And each of them is wired together to the central nervous system. Those kinds of eyes allow dragon flies to be the terrific predators that they are as adults because they have excellent visual acuity. Moreover, they can see visible light like we can. They can also see polarized light and ultraviolet light. And the eye. It shows in this particular critter not so well in this one. They have all those subunits, but the subunits aren't all the same. Some of them differ structurally in terms of the pigments they contain from the rest of them and those are concentrated in the upper surface of the eye and that's what we call the phobia. And you can actually see here that the omatidia in the phobia look different than the omatidia in the lower eye. The structural differences and probably the neurological differences and the pigment differences in those units give the dragonfly excellent excellent visual contrast and are essential in terms of how dragon flies aren't. Because they do something pretty remarkable. When you read popular literature and dragon flies are described as pursuit aerial predators. And that's technically incorrect. They are actually intercepted aerial predators really neat study by Linadol actually analyzed what goes on when dragon flies see a prey item. And what happens happens in milliseconds. 300 million years of evolution to perfect the system. So these guys are able to see and recognize a potential prey item. Track it. Decide whether they're going to take off this track the animals flying overhead again is probably mostly the phobia the upper part of the eyes is tracking this. And then not launch themselves at the bottom, but launch themselves to where the bug is going to be. They intercept it, rather than chase it. And what that means in terms of dragon flies. Is their efficiency as predators is pretty astounding I just, I just hunted up some various predators success ratios of the things we typically think of as big time predators like the big cats and so forth. Maybe some of them are pretty low tigers 5% wolves 14% lions depending on whether they're group hunting or not 1725% your cat 32% a good reason if you've got cats as I do to keep them inside because they kill lots of things that they don't need to. And that's probably up there 47%. They all pale in comparison to dragon flies, which have a 95% success rate. Again, 300 million years of evolution. Like all insects six up flies, and the twisted wing parasites that have wings dragon flies have four weeks. We have already seen that in terms of our comparison of damsel fly and dragon fly wings. The wings move independently effect may flies and dragon flies are often described as having a primitive form of flight. It's called direct flight musculature. These are actually being pulled up and down by muscle attachments. Let's start not the way most quote unquote modern wing modern insects fly. Those independently moving primitive wings are highly maneuverable and allow dragon flies to pull off something that many insects can't. And that is they can hover, they can fly forward, they can fly sideways. And that's pretty cool. I often see on Wikipedia and places like that that dragon flies fly 50 miles an hour. None of the studies that I have seen, bring them anywhere close to that. Fast flying dragon flies maybe 25 to 35. Which still pretty fast for an insect that size. Damsel flies tend not to approach those speeds are often described as being weaker flyers I'm not sure what that means they're slower flyers certainly, and they don't tend to fly in long straight lines, unlike dragon flies. But but they certainly are capable of the same maneuverability. We think of insect migrants and immediately we think of modern butterflies as well we should. So it turns out lots of dragon flies are migrants to 16 species at least in North America are migrant dragon flies. In fact, some of the first dragon flies will see this week down where you folks are. Didn't emerge here. They've come from farther south. And so the common green darter is one great example of these migrants and like monarchs. These are generational migrations, a single animal does not migrate south and then migrate all the way back north again. It's done in generations. Okay. So we have some generations that breed in one location, and then move. We have others that breed in a southern location and then stay there. And then we have another generation that emerges from the southern extremes of the range. And that's the generation that moves back north. And again, there are 15 other species besides this one that have a similar kind of migration pattern. Record holder. You know, I think about birds, for example, I think about the Arctic turn says this wonderful migration from the Arctic to Antarctica and back again, it's like 25,000 miles a year. And this little dragon flies sometimes found thousands of miles out to sea on ships. Right. One that I know of that does kind of a transcontinental generational migration. These guys as individuals don't make the whole thing it's done in generations, but individuals that have been tagged have flown as far as 3,700 miles. Again, we're talking about a critter about this big. That's pretty remarkable. Next differences. I'm going to talk a little bit about the dragon flies. Well, the easy way with dragon flies is to look at the body shape. Males will have a little structure right here. That little structure is the secondary sex apparatus. The primary sex apparatus is back here. Males like that. Female abdomens tend to be thicker. And that tends to hold true most of the way along the abdomen compared to males. There are some other ways to tell if you've got them in hand. Males will have three structures on the tail and females will only have two that are really prominent. Sometimes the color patterns different sometimes it's not depends on the species. You are pretty similar to abdominal pattern differs a little bit, but the thoracic pattern is pretty much the same. You know, this species, there are distinct color differences between the sexes. So this is one of our most common damsel flies are the Eastern fork tail. This is the typical male coloration. This is an immature female. And this is a mature female. Males are very distinctive. Very easy to separate sexes based solely on coloration in terms of reproduction. Damsel flies and dragon flies share in common. The fact that the male has special terminal for lack of a better term, claspers at the end of its abdomen, that it grabs on to females with either just behind the head and dragon flies, or just behind the first part of the thorax in damsel flies. Now they're not copulating, right. The male has just grabbed the female. And why these claspers and they have actually technical things we can talk about. Paraprox and epiprox and CT and Siri and so forth, but you can think of this sort of as a key. And you can think of this part of the thorax is a scanning micrograph of a female. This is the first part of the thorax is the second part. You can see this structure here. Okay, you can think of that as the lock. The male has to have the right key to fit the species specific female lock. And the only one on this particular lock is this guy. None of these other keys will fit this formation. And so they won't be able to grasp on effectively. By the way, the structure of these species specific terminal claspers is how you can identify that these guys species pretty easily if you've got a simple little hand lens. So copulation involves the cooperation of the female. So if the male grab the males always going to be in front, right. And he's always. But the female actually has to bring her reproductive structures in contact with the male for copulation to actually occur. And that's her in tandem. And he transfers a sperm packet to a secondary sex apparatus, and she doesn't form this thing that we call the wheel. There is no copulation so she's essentially in control here. And what will happen is if it takes too long for her to cooperate, the male will let her go and go look for another date, following a successful copulation comes egg laying. Any species to prevent other males from copulating female. The male will guard the female while she lays eggs. And that's what's doing what's going on here. The male is still attached. The female has snaked her abdomen under this floating leaf. She's going to make a tiny little slit in the plant tissue and put one egg in that slit. And damsel flies are all obligatory endophytic ovipositors that is they breed in plant stems or plant lead plant matter. In other species, like this eastern amber wing of the male does not stay attached, but he stays right near the female, and he drives off any male that attempts to copulate or because the way dragon flies and damsel flies. Reproductive structures work is when a male copulates with a female, the first thing he does is try to remove or pack any sperm that she already has a reproductive system from previous copulations, leaving his sperm in ascendancy, which means most of the eggs fertilized will be fertilized. So there's a real premium in terms of fitness for males ensuring that no other males copulate with a female they've copulated with. So most of the eggs that are fertilized will be fertilized with their sperm. There are other exceptions where females are ovipositing by themselves. Yeah, it happened in some species more than others damsel flies in particular sometimes the male's job gets a little higher because the females will sometimes submerge along a plant stem and actually lay their egg well down the plant stem dragging the male along with them sometimes male go along for the ride sometimes you let go. Some eggs once they've been laying. That's on the species. Some eggs will hatch almost instantly. Some eggs will go into a creation state. Some eggs will actually overwinter as eggs. But when the egg finally hatches out of it comes a thing that we call a pro larva. And the pro larva has the shortest developmental interval of any of the stages of the larva, because almost immediately after it gets out of the egg, it molds out of that form. And you can see that's going on right here. You can see the exoskeleton being left behind into the first larval stage. And from then, it's all about eating, growing and not being eaten. So the cycle continues. What about mains? Oh, not a fauna. Well, there are 471 known North American species and main has over a third of them. That is remarkable. So what we have by contrast just listed some large land areas and the total number of Odinate species they have. So we're talking about, you know, states that are twice as big, Great Britain's Britain's three times as big Italy is eight times as big as big as they don't have anywhere near the Odinate fauna. And it has to do with the kind of unique transitional vegetation and water bodies that we have in the state and our rich, rich assemblage of, you know, bogs and lakes and ponds streams and fens and so forth that accounts for this really high Odinate fauna and diversity. Three families of dragonflies, three families of damselflies. Do we find new species? Yeah, we do. We've added some new species just in the last couple of years. One the mocha emerald found by the eminent field biologist Mark Ward. And the banded pennant, found by a newbie who doesn't really know anything about damselflies and dragonflies and didn't really know that this was a new species remain. So there are new species that are cropping up and probably not because we hadn't found them before, more likely because they're moving north in their ranges. So let me just go through a quick overview of some of our representative species. The broad wings. These are these beautiful little metallic usually greenish blue animals that we frequently find near streams or rivers with overhanging foliage they're very territorial. They're just gorgeous and they're very photogenic to go down there with your camera you can have great pictures of these guys. This one is the most common when you're likely to see the ebony jewel wing. We've probably all seen these little guys come all blue it's right black and blue, almost every pond and lake in Maine has them. And you've probably seen this one too right. And we're heavy. As it turns out, there are lots of species of bluits of these pond damsels and the black and blue color pattern is the most common color pattern. I don't have them all represented here. So it's the most common color scheme you can see in this group. There are other color schemes. There are some that are violet, there are some that are red or orange or true yellow or a metallic green and blue. Okay, but, but these guys are black and blue. The third family are what we call the spread wings. And you can see why this animal's got a swing folded but not folded over its abdomen if I show you a damsel fly. They're folded over the abdomen. These guys are kind of held at 45 degree angles, hence the term spread wing. Now can damsel flies do that sometimes, sometimes they do but normally not normally they fold their wings like this. And we've got a number of species of these guys as well. And these aren't all of them by names. The dragon flies. Six families. The dinosaurs, as most people are familiar with, these tend to be dark bodied insects with yellow and or green thoracic and abdominal markers. Many of them are very similarly colored, but often you can distinguish between species based on the nature of the markings on the thorax, together with the ones on the abdomen. And you can see in this one, the thoracic stripe is interrupted. While these it's continuous. This one has no markings in between its blue thoracic stripes. This one does have markings between its yellow blue thoracic stripes couple species. You can hardly see any dark green and blue, the common darner, and this magnificent animal green and brilliant orange red, the common darner, the club tails, the confetti. So name because the, at the end the last few segments tend to be club shaped. I show you a couple of these guys you can see some of the clubs are really quite large. Again, reduced in these species. This particular guy, the black children spiny leg is almost surely the one that lands on your boat or your raft or your hat. When you go out in the boat or you're down to the water, very common and the frequently go for a ride in your kayak or your canoe. The emeralds, the cordulity. Generally, many species have these emerald green eyes. That's what gives the family its common name, not all species, but many species do. Again, these tend to be dark dragonflies with often metallic color patches, particularly on the thorax. The spike tails only have three species. They're all dark bodies, they're all vivid yellow coloration, and they're very easy to tell apart in terms of species based on that color pattern on the abdomen. The cruisers, only two species of these in Maine. One of the very first one that emerges in Maine is Didemups transversa. And this is a long leg at Larva and it will crawl some way out of the water to do its emergent off the side of your house. And then finally, the last group is the white. And these are the skins. And they come in a variety of colors and sizes. The white faces, a very small group, very active, out usually very early in the season, very common. Lots of pennants and skimmers of various colors and color patterns. Many of these are pretty easy to identify to species as adults, particularly the males. So if you get a dragonfly book and you take some pictures, you should be able to get these. One of our smaller ones, the Eastern Amber Wing Parathenas tenora, our very smallest one. Nanothermous bella. This is a tiny, it's actually smaller than many damselflies. It's really dramatic. So these guys are pretty similar. This is the slady skimmer. This is the spangled skimmer. The real difference is based on the color of the terastigma, white and black, just black here. But again, you can see this great distance away in terms of species. Again, some of these guys are pretty colorful and some of them are pretty similar. So kind of the late summer, early fall, meadow hawks emerge, and many of those species are basically red. One species is black. We tend to see it infrequently. So that's kind of an overview of the native fauna. I want to say just a word about rarity. The federal government does listings of species based on whether they're threatened or endangered or a special concern. And the state government does it too. The state has its own Endangered Species Act. The federal government listings always proceed, but Maine can list things the federal government does not. And all states can do this. So this little critter is what I found. I found it in four locations and that's the only place that's ever been found. So from Maine standards, this is a rare bug, only known from like five water bodies in Maine, probably introduced by a boater. But as it turns out, it's not a rare bug. It's found in almost every state, east of the Mississippi. And this map doesn't show it all down through Mexico and Central America into Southern Northern South America. It's the most common species in its genus. So it's really, really abundant. This little guy is the scarlet blue. We just study a couple of years ago, my students and I, and tried to locate as many breeding locations in Maine for the species as we could and we found a lot of them. So any of the reds or dark red are for breeding locations for that year. So very, very abundant. But this is the entire global range for this species. It's found no place else in the world, except this area. And most of the breeding locations for this globally rare bug are right here in Maine. So you always have to be careful when you use the term rare. Our own federally endangered species is this one, the ringed bog hunter. This is found in PD bogs, primarily in extreme Southern Maine. We haven't found any place else and we've looked. So why do I think these groups are important? Why do we design a whole seven year study, get all hundreds of people out combing the state for these things. Well, you know, to have great ecological significance in terms of aquatic food webs. First of all, I've already pointed out their generalist predators. They eat lots of stuff. They worms, they insects, they eat small fish, small tadpoles, the small salamanders, they'll eat just about anything. They'll eat other odonates actually. But they're also an important prey item. Lots of things eat them. Frogs eat them, fish eat them, leeches may eat them, other odonates may eat them, other insects may eat them. So they're really important in aquatic food webs and their importance as a prey item, of course, is recognized by people who fly fish. So there are lots of lures that are designed like either the adult or the larval odonate to try and get fish. But equally important, these guys are generalist predators in the terrestrial ecosystem. And they eat all sorts of things, right. They're also really important prey items, and they probably have been important prey items for millions of years. I particularly like this representation by the American Museum of Natural History, showing what was a pterosaur pursuing a dragonfly. So clearly contemporary birds do it, probably flying reptiles did as well. But equally important in terms of their ecological function is their role as biological indicators. Because odonates can be good reliable indicators of habitat integrity of freshwater systems, in part because of their role in the food webs. But also because of their reliance on near shore aquatic plants, both submerged plants and emergent plants, which they use for egg laying. They use for larval habitat, that's where most of the larvae live. And in some species that's the emergence habitat, they crawl up on pipe weed and then they're, excuse me, pipe warts and arrow leaves and things like that. But also important is the reliance of this group on shoreline terrestrial vegetation. In terms of feeding, that's where they forage. That's where they roost at night. That's where they shelter out of the wind or out of the sun or out of the rain. So, so having a rich ordinate fauna says something about the plants at that particular site as well. And then some species are just more contaminants. You don't find them in places where certain clients. So I often think of very rich. Odinate habitat is looking like this. Some places got lots of shoreline vegetation, but lots of aquatic vegetation, both emergent and submerged. So any of those are rich and they vary in terms of the assemblages associated based on the plants that are there. So major conservation concerns for this group, well shoreline habitat disturbance, loss of near shore aquatic vegetation because nobody wants it, they're swimming area. But also loss of shoreline vegetation. I'll talk about aquatic plants called God terrestrial plants at the shoreline. Public access or quality. We in Maine are quite lucky and that many of our lakes and ponds are not well developed. Go next door to Vermont or New Hampshire and it's a very different scene. Much of the vegetation around many of the ponds has been eliminated a bunch of the aquatic vegetation has been eliminated and it's very poor. Odinate habitat as a result pesticides and here I'm talking primarily about pesticides applied on land that then run off. Climate change climate changes affecting all sorts of organisms on the planet right now and Odates are no exception. And of course, introduce species, whether the species are introduced accidentally, whether the species are introduced. Or whether the species are introduced purposely. In the case of using dragonflies from out of state to control mosquitoes in some townships. First of all, let me point out, there's no evidence that actually work. You can say whatever they like, there's no data to support it but I have an asterisk there because if you put a bunch of studies have shown if you put a bunch of mosquito larvae in big barrels and introduce dragonfly larvae and some of them. Yeah, they'll eat them and controlled among larvae. But there's no evidence this works. However, introducing more dragon flies into our cast dragon flies may alter the predator prey ratio to the detriment of all of the drag. And remember, you want the same dragon flies to actually breed and be there next year to right introducing dragon flies. Who knows out of the range maybe new species may actually be introducing competitors for native species that they're not able to compete effectively with. So it may actually be harming the native Odinate fauna with these kinds of introductions. The highest on my list is the fact that dragon flies eat anything. We think of them as mosquito hawks or deer fly hawks. Oh please. The number of times I've seen them eat mosquitoes or deer flies was pretty pretty slim compared to all the things I've seen the need. Okay, those are all need a pollinators that are all being consumed by dragon flies, they will eat anything that flies they think they can catch, including other dragon flies. They're even records of large dragon flies. Okay, so they don't specialize they're a generous predator they eat anything and everything, not just mosquitoes, not just deer flies and horse flies. And then finally I should point out this is not legal without a permit from I FW. Lastly, I just always get asked about good sources for identification so I maintain this website is go main damsel flies and dragon flies that come up. The pull down menu menu will get our list species toggle anyone it can take all sorts of pictures of our state spawner and I update this frequently. Someone asked about guides. Those are the top ones I would recommend if I was only going to own one book on dragon flies it would be Dennis Paulson's book. All the damsel flies and dragon flies east of Mississippi. He's got one for the west to own just one book damsel flies it would be at lamps terrific book specializes on the northeast. And then third or three books. Any one of these is good Blair Nicholas, many of the pictures you saw were his. Many of the dragon flies and Massachusetts we have as well. This one for the National Park is about two thirds of our dragon flies really well done really well laid out. And that's a dunkel has this dragon flies through binoculars, all of them for North America. So any of America. You can go online, find it download it. It's got pictures of everything. I carry one on my phone. Really easy. If you're not familiar with naturalist, I will suggest that you set up an account and go on it you can do explore. I just put in Odinata here and main, and you can see all of the species that have been reported in Maine. I think from 1200 observers nearly 8,000 reports since I naturally started taking reports, which was about 2011, and about 146 of our 161 species have been reported. But what you can do is you can quickly see kind of an overview of these guys look like and say, oh yeah, mine looks like this one. Okay. Just let me quickly. Thank my collaborators. Phillip to mint to main idea was an I have to be a biologist of the late Paul Brunel. Herb Wilson from Colby and I worked together for many years, Mark Ward, eminent field biologist and lots and lots and lots of you have students who have worked with me for years. So I can see her just fine. And I would be happy to field any questions, people might have really, really informative. A lot. Are there any questions. Yes. The, the person asking the question, can you hear me, Ron. I can hear you I can't hear the person asking the question. I didn't know if I needed to speak into the know I can hear you can hear you. Okay, and has noticed since the first year they live there that he finds exoskeletons on cement on the wall of the house on kayaks and all sorts of places that don't seem like dragonflies would be attaching them or the, they would be attaching themselves at that last stage. That's really, really very common. Remember the dragonfly larva in that final instar is trying to get out of the water, it's going to be very vulnerable. And so the farther you can get from the water and the higher up it can get off the ground, the better its chances of survival. Because once it emerges, it's really, really fragile I mean, you can't even touch them or their wings won't open normally. I used to have a house right next to the lake about 15 feet away. And when did a mops transversely would emerge I would have 40 or 50 of these all over my house, which was fun because you know the house was basically an emergent site for them so that they'll use any, any vertical surface it doesn't really matter to them because they're not going to stay there they're just going to merge there and then leave. Thank you. Any other questions. Question is about dragonflies getting to Tahiti. And whether this goes way back did they come by ship. Were they there before the island separated out. That's, that's a good question. So, part of the answer is probably be there before in some areas of the world because remember. Dragonflies have been around for 300 million years. The face of the planet looked a very different 300 million years ago. Right. And it's slowly changed as continents have moved so where you find dragonflies now, maybe related to where dragonflies were before in the case of volcanic islands. It's different. In those cases, the animals are either migrants, like Pantella for bessons, the wandering glider, their wind blown, or they end up rafting on as probably a larval forms and wet stuff that floats around the marine environment. In, in the volcanic islands, these guys are all introduced in one in one way or another. Other questions. A question, Ron, what are the wings made out of that look, you know, almost completely transparent. So the, the wing material itself is a combination of things kiting the same the same stuff really that the exoskeleton is made out of it's just very thin by contrast. And in that wing are veins in which what passes for one insects is actually circulating. Right, so those those veins are actually all actual structural veins but they're also transport vessels as well. So, so, primarily, kiting is the structural component. And that's what holds them stiffly. Right once once they dry once they dry they're very, very stiff. And dragonflies are pretty tough I mean if you net one I mean I sometimes like now you, you can take their wings together to general, you know, extract them look at them take pictures of them and set them down and they'll straighten their wings back out and take off. And the same with with damsel flies, they're unlike butterflies. They don't they're not really harmed by handling them. Any other questions from anyone. Looks like we're good. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for. Thanks for having me. Okay. Good night all.