The War of the Dragonflies

In the Western Adirondack Mountains in New York, you will find one of the most beautiful paddling trips east of the Great Lakes. The Bog River Flow (Lows Lake) is 14.5 miles of scenic, unspoiled beauty with bogs, eagles, and the largest concentration of loons in the state of New York. The campsites are so far apart that you can be there for days and never see another soul.

On one trip up the River, I had a very unique experience that even baffled Clark Shiffer, a well-respected Odonate expert (dragonflies and damselflies) who was a colleague of mine back when I worked for The Nature Conservancy. My friend Brenda and I were camping at our favorite site amongst the hemlocks and Canada mayflowers, taking day trips paddling around the large lake, exploring beaver dams and bouncing on the floating bog mats.

I spent several days sitting on the beach, watching the water. I noticed that about 3:00 in the afternoon, the dragonflies changed guard. The flying fairies most prevalent in the early afternoon hung out in the shrubs along the shoreline. But precisely at 3:00, they disappeared, and a larger dragonfly species took their place, flying out over the still water. A third type of dragonfly overlapped both shifts, appearing about 2:00 pm and departing the scene around 5 pm.

To aid in this discussion, I must give names to these latter two species to avoid confusion in you, the reader. So the larger dragonfly I shall refer from here on out as the egg chain dragonfly, and the other the lily pad dragonfly. I do not know their proper names, regrettably.

On one particular afternoon I watched the lily pad dragonfly laying her eggs. She would land on a pad, tip her abdomen into the water and up under the lily pad, and deposit her eggs. She would lay several times under one pad, then fly to another and repeat the process again.  Every once in awhile, a bass would jump up and snatch a lily pad dragonfly, then disappear down into the tea-colored water happy and fat.

The egg chain dragonfly had a completely different strategy for laying her eggs. She would make arched flights downward and release a gel-covered chain of eggs into the water. If you have ever seen a hummingbird doing its U-shaped dive flight, that is what the egg chain dragonfly looks like as she delivers the next generation of dragonflies to the world.

Here is the fantastic part. So I am watching the lily pad dragonfly doing her things, when all of a sudden the egg chain female swoops down and lays a gooey sticky strand of eggs precisely over the body and wings of the lily pad female. Up she flew and began her dive like Snoopy fighting the Red Baron, laying another strand on top of the now helpless lily pad female. Three strands of eggs later, the lily pad dragonfly was done, completely engulfed in gel. The bass didn't miss a beat, and jumped up for dessert. Survival of the fittest.

But it didn't end there. This female continued to seek out lily pad dragonflies and dive bomb them with egg chains, essentially sticking them to the top of the lily pad and preventing any further egg laying by the helpless females. I had never seen anything like this before or since.  My friend Clark had also never witnessed anything so bizarre in his 40 plus years of watching these beautiful insects. I felt blessed to see such wonder in nature.

It is amazing to think about all of the encounters that go on in our natural world everyday, whether we are there to witness them or not. I wonder just how accurate our descriptions are of the lives of our animal neighbors, after all we only see what they want us to see.

I wonder what they are doing when we aren't looking.