Alien invasion

One of the more memorable events of my most recent trip home was witnessing an alien invasion.

Okay, maybe what I actually witnessed dragonfly hatch day 2010, but I swear they look like aliens. It was fascinating to watch them undergo metamorphosis. I may have possibly taken approximately 60,000 pictures of the event just to make sure I didn't miss anything. I only did it for you. I'm not obsessed. I swear.

The dragonfly larvae crawl out of the water and perch themselves on a surface. In my experience it is most often a vertical surface, for example the nice shingled siding of our boathouse. I'm not sure what signals them to make the water-to-land transition, but for whatever reason, this year they chose Memorial Day for the mass exodus from their larval prisons.

So they bust out of their skin and begin hanging upside-down, doing periodic hanging crunch-type things as their bodies move further out of the larvae. Then they do some serious acrobatics: They flip right-side-up and grab onto their old larval head and pull their body the rest of the way out.

If all that weren't crazy-impressive enough, they then pump fluid out of their fat bodies into their shriveled up wings, slowly inflating them.

They just keep pumping up their wings, and once they're done with that they hang around to let their wings dry up before they go flying off.

Isn't he (or she...I'm no expert in determining the sex of dragonflies) pretty? Isn't it crazy how those dinky little wings turn into those big glossy numbers?

*Disclaimer: I have no actual scientific knowledge of any of this stuff so don't go quoting me for your next science project.