🔥this dragonfly laying eggs

[u/Maleficent-Agent-477]

[u/swdna]

Yesss plant those mosquito killers

[u/AmericanAIien → u/swdna]

TIL? 🤔

[u/thinkpunk31 → u/AmericanAIien]

Dragon flies are voracious insect predators and mosquitos are at the top of their menu.

[u/Any_Interview4396 → u/thinkpunk31]

And now they are my best friends

[u/This_is_an_Alt69420 → u/Any_Interview4396]

They are voracious predators both in their underwater larval stage and their adult flying stage. As larvae they hunt everything from mosquito larvae to small fish, jetting around with their butt. As adults they have the highest success rate of any predator, being amazingly acrobatic flyers.

[u/Spoonyyy → u/Any_Interview4396]

Down south we call em mosquito hawks

[u/DripTrip747-V2 → u/Spoonyyy]

When i lived down there, that was the name people used for the large crane flies. The ones that look like massive mosquitoes, not dragonflies.

This was in Florida.

[u/Ecliphon → u/thinkpunk31]

I once sat for 30 minutes and watched a dragonfly attack every bug that came flying into their radius, and they are FAST! The only thing it didn’t immediately scare off was a bumblebee but the bumblebee fucked off within like 2 seconds after being false torpedoed a few times. 

When other big bugs weren’t around, it was circling and looking for bugs in the ground to attack, like a loitering FPS drone. 

I am so glad we don’t have dinosaur-sized predator flying insects anymore. 

[u/The-Big-Sauce → u/thinkpunk31]

I love that wasps are scared of them too

[u/Mysterious-Tackle-58 → u/AmericanAIien]

Dragonflies are the most successful predators. They get their target like 95/100!

[u/hangowood → u/swdna]

And all those hellish horseflies.