SCIENTIST>> Go Team!
>>JESSICA WARE (IN THE FIELD): See their eyes?
Very good vision.
>>JESSICA WARE (IN INTERVIEW): I think I became interested in studying dragonflies
because I think that they’re really pretty,
and they’re kind of ubiquitous around water.
And I like to canoe and swim and fish and things like that.
But I kind of assumed that all of the dragonfly questions had been answered,
because they’re really charismatic, and like, gorgeous insects.
So I actually planned to go and do something totally different when I went to graduate school.
Luckily, there was somebody at my institution that studied dragonflies, systematic dragonfly evolution,
who assured me there’s actually still a lot of questions left to be answered f
or dragonflies and damselflies.
How big is a population? How far individuals migrate.
Some of those basic biology and natural history questions we still don’t have answers to.
We think flight probably evolved around 400 million years or so ago.
Before birds,
before bats,
before pterosaurs.
There was nothing in the sky.
And then there were insects.
Probably something that was dragonfly-like.
So when we think about some of the big, charismatic things like dinosaurs,
what was in the sky when there were dinosaurs?
Dragonflies.
But modern Odonata, which is the order than comprises dragonflies and damselflies, are much younger,
around 250 million years or so.
Dragonflies and damselflies are sister groups.
Just like all insects, they have six legs,
they have a head, a thorax and an abdomen.
There’s a little, teeny, tiny cluster of ganglia that is their brain.
As far as we know, Odonates don’t hear.
So the sense they’re really using in their day-to-day is vision.
And what’s neat about dragonflies is that their head is mostly eyes,
because they use vision for hunting their prey.
They’re like lions in the sky.
They have a lot of color in their body, color on their wings.
Some of it is for sexual signaling,
some of it is for blending in with their surroundings,
some of it is for thermoregulation.
Their wings are kind of remarkable.
Tiffany made lamps with dragonfly wing venation in it.
The patterns of veins that you see in the wings,
I always thought it was beautiful, striking, artistic even.
But it actually has a really important role in maintaining particular styles of flight.
The more dense the wing venation is, the stiffer the wing is.
So some dragonflies fly really long distances
high in the air column at fast speeds.
And they tend to have very stiff wings.
And when there's kind of sparse venation it tends to be more bendable, more flexible.
And there are other dragonflies and damselflies that might fly in and amongst vegetation,
and they need to be really maneuverable.
Dragonflies and damselflies all have aquatic, freshwater nymphs.
Females lay eggs in fresh water.
And then the eggs hatch and they develop their wings in fresh water.
And then when they’re adults, they kind of unfurl their wings, dry, and the take off in flight.
There’s around 6,500 species of dragonflies and damselflies,
found in all of the continents except for Antarctica.
But we do have fossils from Antarctica.
Pretty much anywhere that you go,
If you go to the Namib Desert, a really dry, arid place,
there’s dragonflies there.
If you go to the rain forest,
the temperate forests,
if you go to the Arctic Circle north of 66 degrees, there are dragonflies there.
People often don’t think of the Arctic as being a place where you would find dragonflies.
As a result, the dragonflies that are north of the Arctic Circle, they’ve been poorly studied.
And those in particular are the ones that we’ve primarily focused on in my lab.
We know that Odonates are responding really quickly to climate change.
Some colleagues have kind of dubbed them to be climate canaries,
because when the climate is poor, they leave.
I think historic collections are what is going to allow us
to make predictions about the future.
And actually kind of set and make conservation priorities.
We think there’s insect decline taking place right now.
Alarm bells are ringing, right?
And we turn to the entomologists and say, what should we do?
Well the answer most entomologists would say is,
for my group, I don’t know,
because we don’t know how big a population is for any particular dragonfly or damselfly species.
We don’t know exactly how big the ranges are for many of the species.
But these kind of historical collections, these can be the beginning of our baseline data.
These tell us, this dragonfly used to be found in location X 100 years ago,
but it hasn’t been found there for the last 50 years.
So what happened?
These are kind of like guidebooks, you know?
They’re guidebooks of where to find insects.
The bulk of species richness for insects is actually in the global south.
But with collections, capacity is really concentrated in the global north,
which is due to historical reasons, colonialism, what have you.
To try and take some steps towards equity,
we want to make collections
more freely accessible to all of our colleagues,
by scanning them, by digitizing them,
by having CT scans that are available for multiple colleagues around the world work on.
We have a lot of work to do.
But these are all things that I think can make collaboration really fruitful.