Insect Picture of the Day

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Today’s amazing insect photo comes to us from “Jeff T”, who photographed this dragonfly at a lake in Estonia with his Canon A95 camera. I am not certain about the species here, but I’m pretty sure this is a female dragonfly, as Jeff has caught her in the act of laying her eggs, a behavior quite rare among male dragonflies.

It was kind of hard for me to understand this picture visually when I first received it. Here’s a dragonfly on a log or tree trunk, with a weird kind of meniscus behind her, what is that? Jeff filled in the missing detail for me: that’s not a tree, it’s a dock piling. The photo is looking down into the lake itself. Jeff captured the dragonfly’s wingspan across the frame. If we rotate the image until the dock piling is upright, we get this perspective, and the water reflections suddenly all make sense:

According to Jeff’s report, she was about 10cm long. This picture was taking in July or August of this year.

Dragonfly eggs hatch into nymphs, which are aquatic and cheerfully carnivorous. They eat mosquitoes, midges, and the larvae of anything in the lake. I have even heard that they will go after small fish!

Awesome photo, Jeff! Thank you!