0:00

"When I was a child, I saw a dragonfly at a lake, and I happened to catch one. I brought it home and I looked at it under the microscope and I saw that marvelous faceted eye. And I was just hooked."

00:18

Apparently, that first childhood experience made a lasting impression on Steve Valley. "Boy, he's flying low."

00:29

Here at the foot of Mount Bachelor, the summer weather is warm. There are lots of small insects in the air, too. It's a good day for dragonflies. "He's giving me a good bite. Doesn't hurt too terribly, just a little pinch."

00:45

Steve and his friend, Jim Johnson, are amateur odonatists, enthusiasts of dragonflies and their close cousins, damselflies. "Dragonflies are one of the oldest groups of insects, 350-375 million years old. Dragonflies were here long before the dinosaurs. They were here before any vertebrates walked on the land. And they're still here."

1:11

The large, flying creature we call a dragonfly is actually an insect in its final, and shortest, stage of life. "The dragonfly adult is just the mating and dispersal stage. It lasts a few weeks -- maybe a couple months with some species. But the real insect is the larva, the aquatic stage, that's hidden, that lives under the water for a year, two years, maybe up to five years, depending on the species, before it becomes an adult." "They seem to like the older wood better. It's got more cracks in it." "Here's another one ... a nice fat one, too."

1:53

For more than 90 percent of its life, a dragonfly looks like this. "He's about as large as he's going to get. I think that within a week or two, he'll probably climb out onto one of these logs and quietly metamorphose into an adult."

2:10

In both phases of their lives, these insects are voracious eaters. "They're part of a food chain. Their main function is just as a predator of other, smaller insects. And then other organisms eat them."

2:25

A nearby dipper helps itself to some dragonfly nymphs. Replacements, however, are on the way. "Female ovipositing here! She may lay a thousand eggs today."

2:38

This is the climax of the dragonfly's life cycle -- the laying of the eggs -- ovipositing. "The whole reason for an adult dragonfly's existence is to mate and pass its genes on. They have the best eyesight of any insect. They have almost 360-degree vision and they can see quite sharply images maybe a hundred feet away."

3:04

They are elusive, but they're also known to fly right up and perch on their pursuers. "They really like to land on light-colored wood or light objects. If you can learn to identify birds, you can learn to identify very many of the dragonflies in the field." "This is a male aeshna californica, California darner."

3:33

Surprisingly, scientific knowledge about this insect family is limited. "There's lots of mysteries about dragonfly life."

3:40

No one is sure, for instance, where the adults go at night. "Out in the brush, up in the trees. We don't really know. They haven't gotten the kind of interest that butterflies, moths and beetles get, because so many of them are pests."

4:00

Dragonflies' low profile is partly due to their own "good behavior." They don't eat plants, they don't spread disease, so they've been largely ignored. To this day, the various species are seldom known by common names. Some species don't even have them. Unlike most other dragonflies, this one does not breed and live in lakes or rivers. Instead the nymph stays up to five years in a tiny burrow. "Right here is a Tanypteryx burrow. There's a larva down inside that, waiting for a spider or a grasshopper to come along."

4:37

The nymph in the hole looks like something like this. "It's just an empty shell, the skin of the nymph after the adult dragonfly has emerged from it."

4:48

Insects are not the only victims of the dragonfly larvae.
"This is a young western toad, sometimes prey of the older larvae of the Tanypteryx." "There he is, see him? I brought him right up to the top -- see that."

5:08

A little later, Steve spots a just-emerged adult of yet another species. "It's awfully soft-bodied. Its wings aren't even fully expanded yet."

5:19

It seems too big to have been encased in that shell only minutes earlier. Steve has taken these photos which show that an adult dragonfly is packed in pretty tight, before making its final exit. "Kind of like an accordion. He's just really compacted in there. And when he crawls out he's actually really shriveled up still. And then he slowly expands." "There she went."
"I caught him yesterday. He's a blue darner - Aeshna multicolor. See those appendages on the end of his abdomen? They fit into some kind of mechanism behind the female's head. Can you see him trying to chew on me? I can feel it but it doesn't hurt." "Here we have a little red dragonfly, Sumpetrum melodum. There's quite a range in size and the colors are uniquely different. And each one of these has a different lifestyle, different habitat requirements, different prey preferences."

6:33

Odonatists everywhere have been compiling, and sometimes inventing, common names for these insects hoping to encourage more public interest.

6:44

"This would be the Columbia clubtail. This, the western river cruiser. I think it ought to be the gray-eyed, black and yellow, long-legged really fast river skipper."

6:57

Steve thinks the common names may catch on. But meanwhile, he likes the scientific names just fine.
"Somaochlora semicircularis. Anax junius. Those are actually fairly simple words. People don't have any trouble learning words like chrysanthemum, that's a scientific name, or hippopotamus, or rhinoceros."

7:27

This morning, he's spotted several male dragonflies cruising this section of the river, back and forth, pursuing their genetic destiny, looking for females.
"Here comes one. Now that's how it's done. Macromia magnifica male, perfect condition."

7:50

Here on the river, clusters of damselflies are wholly engrossed in their own mating activity. "Well, they're holding onto the female and she's actually inserting her eggs into those leaves."

8:03

The eggs are already fertilized. But the males stay attached to the females' heads. "If he lets go of her, another male will try to mate with her and may do away with his sperm and replace it with his own. He's making sure that he's passing his genes on, by staying hooked up with her."

8:20

Even in this compromised position, some males continue to spar with the competition.

8:28

Damselflies and dragonflies are usually not hard to tell apart. Damselflies, like these, tend to be smaller and more delicate. They fold their wings back over their bodies when resting. Dragonflies keep theirs extended. And the wings themselves are indicators.
"Dragonflies, the hind wing is different from the forewing. In these guys, the hind wing is almost identical to the forewing. Most insects, the ones we see flying by here, are just beautiful prey for some big dragonflies to come along. See her? Where did she go? She landed on that plant right there. She's busy eating and she's not noticing us. That's probably why she's sitting so still. They've got a pretty high metabolism, so they eat a lot of insects in a day, just to keep going."

9:20

An adult dragonfly can eat up to 300 mosquitoes a day. "That's a good reason to have dragonflies around, if there's no other reason. If you don't care that they're beautiful or that they're interesting to watch, just that they catch mosquitoes and eat lots of them. And they do that as nymphs in the water, too."

9:40

In most places they occur, dragonfly species are in pretty good shape. After all, to survive 350 million years requires a certain hardiness. Yet habitat destruction and other human activities do take a toll on some populations. "There should just be hundreds of them here. I'll bet the collectors have already been in here this year."

10:06

Many people who fish use dragonfly larvae for bait, and harvesting by individual fishermen has never had much impact. "Nymph hunters come here specifically to harvest commercially."

10:21

Todd Lake, here, and other high lakes are sometimes swept of larvae for sale in bait shops. "In 1992, the first year I saw people collecting, they had a 30-gallon ice chest that was about half full. It was pretty phenomenal the number of nymphs that they had gotten out of there. And the year after that, there were very few adults flying here."

10:48

Fewer dragonflies could mean more mosquitoes at these recreation sites. And there may be other consequences too. "You know a fair number of the nymphs are fish food, so ... over the long run, the removal of that key component in the food chain is going to impact the fish in all of these lakes."

11:13

Few people will ever be as enthusiastic about dragonflies as Steve Valley is. But these mighty predators of the insect world do have a growing legion of fans. "You know, we're trying to get the public interested in dragonflies and in saving dragonfly habitat. And thinking about the service that dragonflies perform for us in mosquito and other insect control. And to just realize what a really wondrous thing they are, these ancient, ancient insects that still share the world with us."