Relationship

As far as I know, invertebrates don't go in for existential philosophising, but I can't help but feel that it must be a little strange to be in a relationship, albeit temporary, with your former skeleton. Though to be fair, this isn't the weirdest aspect of a dragonfly's life cycle: the whole business of transitioning from water-dwelling nymph to airborne adult is fraught with difficulty and danger, and seems (if one were in the business of process improvement) quite unnecessarily complex. And every time I contemplate the fact that this dragonfly has never been taught survival strategies, but entered our pond as a minute pro-larva fully programmed with all the instinctive knowledge she needed to become a mistress of two different elements, I shake my head in wonderment.

This is one of three Southern Hawkers that left their watery home in the wildlife pond last night, but she was the only one still present in adult form this morning. Of the other two exuviae, one looked quite normal, so I assume that its owner made it out and away safely, but the other, though well placed on the pond sedge, showed no sign of the split thorax and torn spiracle linings you can see here, and I'm afraid that something may have gone wrong and that the nymph failed to eclose. I didn't have time to collect the exuvia today, but I'll try to retrieve it tomorrow to see if I can work out what happened.

Even though this female was fully inflated by the time I spotted her, and seemed to have avoided sustaining any damage, I was concerned that she'd chosen to come out in the midst of a tangle of rush stems. A few minutes after I took this photo she opened her wings for the first time, and they all looked perfect, but I still couldn't see a clear route by which she could fly out of the thicket, and in the end I pulled away the dead brown stem you can see at the right of shot here, to create a gap. Then I deliberately left the area so as not to stress her further, and when I came back ten minutes later the dragon had flown.

R: C4, D1.