[LIGHT, TINKLING PIANO MUSIC]
[Close-up of a dragonfly facing the camera. Its head twitches as it looks around.]
JESSICA WARE (Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): Before birds, before bats, before pterosaurs, the first thing we think to fly was something that was like a dragonfly.
[A dragonfly launches from a stick to catch prey mid-air.]
[A fossil of a dragonfly-like animal from the extinct genus Meganeura. It has wings and a body shape similar to living dragonflies.]
WARE: The extinct genus Meganeura, an ancient relative of today's dragonflies, was just a little smaller than a crow, making it one of the largest insects ever known.
[Animated reconstruction of Meganeura in flight]
WARE: It buzzed around 350 million years ago, even before dinosaurs walked the earth.
[The Meganeura dissolves into a modern-day dragonfly hovering over water.]
[Two dragonflies dip and dive in an aerial battle.]
WARE: So since then, dragonflies have evolved lots of different styles of flight. Today, they’re some of the strongest flyers in the insect world, speeding up to 30 miles per hour, hunting prey like mosquitoes and flies…
[Close-up of a dragonfly hovering in mid-air.]
WARE: …and even hovering effortlessly.—a rare skill. It makes us as researchers want to ask, how are dragonflies so darn good at flying?
[A red dragonfly takes off from a stick in slow motion.]
[On-screen text: Insectarium]
[On-screen text: American Museum of Natural History]
[Jessica Ware speaks to camera in the American Museum of Natural History’s Insectarium.]
DIRECTOR [off-camera]: Hey, Jessica, what's your favorite insect?
[On-screen text: Jessica Ware, Ph.D. | Curator, American Museum of Natural History]
WARE: So hands down, always has been, always will be, forever until the end of time—Odonota, which are dragonflies and damselflies.
[On-screen text: Odonata | dragonflies and damselflies]
WARE: And in particular, dragonflies are my jam. Never, ever get tired of them, from when I was a little kid.
[A dragonfly perches on the wood of a dock.]
WARE: Many, many times laying on the dock next to Lake Muskoka in Canada, a horse fly would come along and a dragonfly would come and snatch it up.
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
WARE: And I thought, “That's boss. Thank you for doing- Thank you for doing that.”So, I appreciated them for their hunting prowess and just- they're just beautiful insects.
[Close-up of perched dragonflies with dramatic colors and patterns on their bodies and wings.]
WARE: But then once I went to graduate school and I learned more about them, I realized that their evolutionary history is so long. Right? And they have these unique adaptations.
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
WARE: And so I just learned that the more I learned about dragonflies, the more there was to learn.
DIRECTOR [off-camera]: Are dragonflies good hunters?
WARE: I would say dragonflies are among the best hunters.
[TEXT: Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium | American Museum of Natural History]
WARE: There’s few other insect predators that are as good at catching things as dragonflies.
[Close-ups of dragonflies chowing down on prey.]
WARE: Dragonflies will really eat anything, including each other, but importantly, they eat flies and mosquitoes that we humans don't like.
[Time lapse of mosquito sucking blood from a human.]
WARE: The mosquitoes that vector or spread malaria, dengue and yellow fever?
[Close up of a dragonfly with a smiling look turning to the camera.]
WARE: Dragonflies eat them. And their success rate at hunting is often close to 100%.
[Close up of dragonfly eating a fly.]
[Slow motion shots of dragonflies chasing prey in midair and zig zagging to intercept.]
WARE: They do intercept style predation. So instead of flying to where their prey is right now, they fly to where their prey will be and they kind of cut it off at the pass. And so they need to be able to change course dramatically.
[Extreme close up of the back of a dragonfly, showing in slow motion the base of beating wings where they attach to the body.]
WARE: They can do a lot of this style of flight because they have direct flight muscles where the wings kind of attach directly to the muscles inside their thorax…
[Slow motion shots of dragonflies hovering and flying, flapping their wings independently of each other.]
WARE: …because basically their whole thorax is flight muscle—and they can move each wing independently. That allows them to kind of have this power and maneuverability in the way that other other insects don't have.
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
DIRECTOR [off-camera]: When you say powerful, what are we talking about?
WARE: Well, I mean, so dragonflies are fast.
[Dragonflies whiz by against a blue sky.]
WARE: There's some dragonflies that can fly up to 30 miles an hour.
[On-screen text: 30 mph / 48 kph]
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
DIRECTOR [off-camera]: And just to be clear, that's faster than Usain Bolt.
WARE: [LAUGHS]
DIRECTOR [off-camera]: But go on.
WARE: Some dragonflies are able to fly really long distances. So people talk about monarchs. They talk about whale movement. There's a lot of animals that travel long distances.
[Single wandering glider dragonfly perched on a blade of grass. Dozens of wandering gliders zig and zag over a field.]
WARE: But a single individual of a wandering glider or Pantala flavescens can travel thousands of kilometers in its lifetime.
[Slow motion of dragonfly turning sharply in flight as it chases prey.]
WARE: Dragonflies are able to do kind of remarkable twists and turns, maneuverability, changing their height in the air column very quickly, turning on a dime, in some cases, in part because of their wing venation.
[A perched dragonfly is silhouetted against a light background. The intricate venation patterns in its wings resemble delicate lacework.]
WARE: Wing venation just means the arrangement of veins in an insect’s wing.
[On-screen text: venation | arrangement of veins]
[Ware walks through the Insectarium, talking to camera.]
DIRECTOR [off-camera]: Yeah. Those veins on their wings are so striking. Do they serve a special purpose?
WARE: Absolutely. So the wing vein patterns in dragonfly wings are directly correlated with flight style.
[Dragonflies swoop and hover over a sunlit field.]
WARE: We generally group dragonflies into two styles—fliers and perchers.
[A split screen shows a stocky, hovering dragonfly on the top, and a dragonfly with boldly striped wings perched on a twig on the bottom.]
[On-screen text: flyer]
[On-screen text: percher]
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
WARE: And then there's some intermediates that we don't really know where they fit, if they're a percher or a flyer.
DIRECTOR [off-camera]: So fliers, I take it they're good at flying?
WARE: For a majority of the day, they are on the wing hunting.
[Slow motion of dragonfly hovering in mid-air.]
WARE: They're on the wing finding a mate.
[Dozens of dragonflies zoom around beneath a cloudy sky.]
WARE: They're on the wing evading predators that are kind of trying to hunt them.
[Extreme close up of the wings of a dragonfly specimen in the museum’s research collection. The veins appear as bold, dark lines between cells in the transparent wing membrane.]
WARE: So they have a very dense amount of wing veins, and that makes the wing much stiffer.
[Ware speaks to camera as she walks through the Insectarium.]
WARE: We think that increased surface area might decrease energy expenditure when they're doing this kind of gliding style flight.
[A large, stocky dragonfly glides and hovers in the wind.]
[A dragonfly lands on a stick.]
DIRECTOR [off-camera]: And perchers?
WARE: They will fly around to find a mate, they fly around to find food.
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
WARE: They might be territorial, so they will fly around to chase other males out of their territory, but then they'll return to a perch.
[A dragonfly returns to its perch on a tree branch. Dragonflies maneuver around reeds and rocks.]
WARE: They're flying in and amongst tree branches. They’re flying in- around rock. Every time dragonfly wings hit any of those things, it actually can tear them…
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
WARE: …because dragonfly wings are rather fragile. So they need to be able to kind of maneuver around those obstacles.
[A dragonfly with lightly veined, almost transparent wings perches on a branch.]
WARE: So, their wings have fewer veins and are much more bendy and flexible.
[Ware and Ph.D. student Rhema Uche-Dike hunt for dragonflies with nets.]
WARE: But back to how dragonflies got to be such good fliers...
[On-screen text: Davidson’s Mill Pond Park | North Brunswick Township, New Jersey]
WARE: We might think it's important to understand whether perches or fliers came first. But it turns out the origins of different flying styles and flight itself are much more complicated than that.
[Ware and Uche-Dike examine a dragonfly they’ve netted.]
WARE: So in the past, like in maybe 100 years ago, people kind of sorted dragonflies into these different piles. And one of the things that they looked at was wing venation, because it's so easy, you can just look at the wings. But when we used DNA to analyze dragonflies and built our first molecular family trees, they didn't agree with what sorting by the wing vein patterns had told us.
[Close-up of Uche-Dike holding the dragonfly and displaying its wings.]
WARE: So, how do we figure out how flight developed? We need to untangle dragonfly evolution. My grad student, Rhema Uche-Dike, is one of the people working on that puzzle.
[Uche-Dike, carrying a large net, hunts for dragonflies near a pond. He swoops the net to catch one, but misses.]
[TEXT: Rhema Uche-Dike | Ph.D. Student, City University of New York]
RHEMA UCHE-DIKE (Ph.D. Student, University of New York): I study dragonfly phylogenetics and that's essentially looking at dragonflies from a family tree perspective—looking at how Species A is related to Species B and how Species B is related to Species C.
[Close-up of Uche-Dike holding a large black and yellow-striped dragonfly. Its striking face features big, green eyes.]
UCHE-DIKE: I'm looking at this particular family called Macromiidae and-
[On-screen text: Macromiidae]
WARE: The river cruisers.
[Ware and Uche-Dike talk in a park setting.]
UCHE-DIKE: The river cruisers. They have these unique flight patterns…
[POV river cruiser, as a camera glides above a stream.]
UCHE-DIKE: …where they fly right in the middle of rivers and what is really interesting and funny and good for me at the same time is since I can't go in the middle of rivers, they happen to also fly down the middle of roads…
[POV river cruiser, as a camera flies over a suburban street.]
UCHE-DIKE: …because they somehow think roads are rivers. And that's good for me because I can catch them on the roads.
[Close-up of Ware holding a Macromiidae dragonfly.]
WARE: Macromiidae, like Rhema studies, and dragonflies from a totally different family, Aeshnidae…
[Close-up of a large dragonfly, which somewhat resembles the Macromiidae species, eating prey.]
[On-screen text: Aeshnidae]
WARE: …are a great example of how two distantly related groups can share the same wing types and flight styles.
[Pinned dragonfly specimen featuring large wings with bold venation.]
[On-screen text: Macromia alleghaniensis | Family: Macromiidae]
[Different pinned dragonfly specimen with a very similar body and wing shape.]
[On-screen text: Gomphaeschna furcillata | Family: Aeshnidae]
WARE: They both have classic flyer wing shapes…
[Extreme close up of large, stiff dragonfly wings, featuring bold venation.]
WARE: …that allow them to fly long distances at fast speeds, spending very little time on the ground.
[A stocky flyer dragonfly hovers in midair, then turns and flies off.]
WARE: Just looking at the flight styles, we might have thought they were close cousins, but now the trees, these phylogenies that we're building with DNA, are painting a much more complex picture.
[Animated dragonfly family tree shows Aeshnidae branching off very early, and far from Macromiidae.]
[Ware and Uche-Dike look for dragonflies in a field of wildflowers.]
WARE: And to fill out those trees, we need to be able to sequence the DNA of many, many dragonfly species.
[Uche-Dike and Ware talk in front of a pond.]
UCHE-DIKE: If you study evolution, you're trying to look at little changes that have happened over a long period of time. So you need to get enough data to be able to quantify how much change is really happening.
[Ware nets a dragonfly and displays it to the camera.]
UCHE-DIKE: So collecting out today helps us, you know, boost data and knowledge and the number of dragonflies there are.
[Uche-Dike and Ware talk in the park.]
UCHE-DIKE: If you're looking for the origin of flight, you want to trace it back to as far back as you can go. And-
WARE: Like, the answer is always that you need a tree, right?
[A big-bodied dragonfly hovers above a windy, grassy plain.]
WARE: To ask questions about the origin of flight—how often did perching style flight evolve?
[A small dragonfly lands on a lily pad.]
WARE: How often did flying style flight evolve?
[Extreme close-up of delicate wing vein pattern. Medium shot of a dragonfly perched on a stick.]
WARE: Certain wing vein patterns? did they arise multiple times because of flight behavior or because of ancestry?—we can't really answer any of those questions without having a tree, without having a phylogeny.
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
WARE: And then we can look to see whether or not there's a certain group maybe that share a common ancestor that have a certain particular trait…
[Extreme close-up on the delicate wings of a research specimen.]
[Dozens of dragonflies hover, zig, and zag over a field.]
WARE: …or if instead these traits are actually not related in any way to their evolutionary history.
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
WARE: When we see that it's a clue, it tells us this is independent of phylogeny. There's something else that's causing convergence.
[Close-ups of two different large black and yellow dragonflies with large green eyes.]
WARE: If two individuals that have very, very distant relatives, if they both have this correlated wing vein pattern, that's interesting!
[Ware speaks to camera in the Insectarium.]
WARE: That makes us want to ask why. What are some of the drivers that would lead them to both do this kind of cruising style flight or gliding style flight? Is it predators? Is it their habitat?
[Ware and Uche-Dike talk in the park.]
WARE: So it's interesting that you say that that Macromiidae as a family might be- How old did you say that it was?
UCHE-DIKE: About 20- 15 to 20 million years ago.
WARE: So that's after kind of what we think is the rise of modern birds.
[A red-winged blackbird eats a dragonfly. Another bird swoops over a pond, trying to catch a dragonfly in flight.]
[Dragonflies with boldly striped wings soar in a blue sky.]
WARE: As the skies started to fill up with birds, with bats, with pterosaurs, we start seeing the evolution of more particular styles of flight maneuverability, speed.
[Close up of a dragonfly taking off from its perch in slow motion.]
WARE: So flight styles may have developed not because Species A was a close cousin of species B, but because they both face the same kind of selection pressure, like a response to threat or taking advantage of a similar opportunity.
[A frog leaps out of a pond, aiming at a dragonfly, but the dragonfly maneuvers away.]
[Ware and Uche-Dike walk in the park with their nets.]
WARE: What gets you kind of jazzed about studying dragonflies? What makes you want to study them?
UCHE-DIKE: I think of studying dragonflies as a win-win because in science, at least in biological sciences, I think you're either interested in an organism or you're interested in a concept.
[Uche-Dike looks for dragonflies with his net. Close-up of him holding a dragonfly.]
UCHE-DIKE: And for studying dragonflies, I'm interested in both. And dragonflies are really old insects.
[Uche-Dike and Ware walk and talk in the park.]
UCHE-DIKE: So that helps with, you know, studying both the organism and both the concepts of phylogenetics.
[Ware looks for dragonflies in a field of flowers.]
WARE: I think that understanding the evolutionary trajectory of species on the planet is vital. I think when I was first trying to decide what type of entomology I wanted to do, kind of I wanted to be an entomologist…
[Ware and Uche-Dike walk and talk in the park.]
WARE: …I thought that maybe I should do something with food security or crop management, something that would be for the greater good.
UCHE-DIKE: Yeah.
WARE: But then once I learned about evolution and systematics, I kind of realized that that actually is for the greater good, like understanding the origin of life, 400 million years of evolution, of flight, of reproductive behavior, I mean, actually helps us understand and conserve biodiversity.
UCHE-DIKE: Yeah, that's very exciting, because when you know what happened in the past, you're able to sort of predict what happens in the future, you know.
WARE: So, you never wake up thinking, “Man, I wish I was studying beetles today”? I never do.
UCHE-DIKE: Nah, I never do.
[Close-up of Uche-Dike holding dragonfly.]
[Credits roll.]
[Extreme close-up of dragonfly wing veins.]
WARE: Humans have used dragonfly wing venation patterns for artwork and for beauty.
[Tiffany stained glass lamps feature colorful dragonflies, their wing veins traced out in metal.]
[Ware speaks to camera in the park.]
WARE: We know that there's lots of lore like my grandmother used to say if you fell asleep by the water, a darner would sew your lips shut…
[A female dragonfly dips its slender, needle-like ovipositor into a pond.]
WARE: …because the ovipositor, or egg-laying apparatus, looks sort of like a darning needle.
[Close-up of a dragonfly with a sharp, tapering ovipositor.]
[Ware speaks to camera in the park.]
WARE: That's of course, not true. And then there are other cultures that really have revered dragonflies.
[Image of elaborate Japanese helmets, featuring dragonfly motifs in their design.]
WARE: Many of the military garb that was worn in ancient Japan actually had dragonflies because they were considered to be very powerful.
[Dragonfly lands on a slender stick.]
WARE: Do you know any dragonfly lore? Tell us about it in the comments.
[Animated PBS logo.]
