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Gardening in Oz

Dragon Flies What is their purpose?

20 years ago

My garden has many dragon flies flittig about at the moment.

What is their purpose?

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Comments (12)

User
20 years ago
Well, apart from looking absolutely stunning (is it obvious that I like them?) they feed on other insects (best of all, mosquitoes) and are of course food for larger creatures such as birds and lizards. Everything in nature has a purpose and is part of 'the big picture'.

Cheers,
Dee.
Sparaxis
20 years ago
I was greatly amused by a woman who called in on a radio gardening program recently. She claimed to have fruit fly but it was determined that she actually had tiny manure flies grazing on the waste material on her compost.
When she found out that they were neither pest nor helpful in her garden, she indignantly asked "Well what are they there for?"
I agree with Dee - everything is part of the bigger picture. We share I lives with billions of other life forms, most of which we are not even aware of. They all have a right to exist on this planet. Humans are no more deserving than any other creature, most of which have far less destructive potential.
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Hank, They could have come from anywhere, you know. They have been hanging around, lurking, just waiting for someone to plant something they really, really like so they could gobble it up. Insects are just a part of the natural world. Sometimes it does amaze me that they can find gardens that contain the very plants they most want to eat. Take asparagus beetles for example. There are not an overwhelming number of gardeners in Oklahoma who grow asparagus. However, just plant some asparagus in your vegetable garden and somehow the asparagus beetles will find it. How do they do that? I have found that garden pests are the worst in new gardens. I guess a new garden is like a buffet to them. I think the insects are worse in general if you don't have a lot of the good bugs like ladybugs, green lacewings, trichogramma wasps, beneficial parasitic nematodes, predator mites, spined soldier bugs and praying mantids. The good bugs help keep the bad bugs under control. It took me a long time to learn this. When I was a kid, my dad always raised tomatoes. Every year, about late June or early July, the red spider mites would show up. They showed up not just on his plants but on the tomato plants of all his gardening friends in our neighborhood. Once the red spider mites showed up, you knew that your plants' days were numbered, no matter what you did. The gardeners would whip out the Kelthane and spray the plants and it seemed that, instead of helping control the spider mites, it made their population spiral wildly out of control. No matter what you did, the mites got worse and worse and worse. As a young adult with a new (to us) home and garden, I planted tomato plants. About the 3rd or 4th week of June, the spider mites showed up. We sprayed with Kelthane and got the same results my dad always got. More spider mites. It really made me crazy. The second year we were there, 1985, here came the spider mites in late June. I was already beginning to move towards gardening organically, so I decided I would not spray Kelthane on the plants. Guess what? The spider mites never went away, but they didn't get worse and they didn't kill my plants. I began to understand that spraying a poison miticide or insecticide did not guarantee a bug-free garden. Still, it took me many years to really understand it all. As I gardened organically, I came to have more and more good bugs over time and fewer and fewer bad ones. It took me FOREVER to really grasp the concept that the good bugs were keeping the population of the bad bugs under control. What I finally learned, from reading a lot about organic gardening and THEN from seeing it in my own garden is this: if you spray a miticide to kill spider mites, it will kill ALL the mites, including the predator mites that eat spider mites. The bad bugs always rebound first as the predator bugs won't arrive until there is a good supply of bad bugs to eat. So, by killing off the one insect, the predator mites, that would kill my red spider mites, I had actually made my spider mite population worse. Nowadays I have a good balance of bugs in the garden and the good ones help keep the population of the bad ones under control. Even though insect and mite damage is unsightly, it usually won't kill the plants. For what it is worth, this year I have the fewest bad bugs I have EVER had. I can't explain why, but I would say my bug population is only about 10% of what it normally is. It might be the cold weather we had in April killed them off and they have been slow to rebound. It might be that last summer's drought killed off a lot of them. Whatever the reason, I am enjoying it. Dawn
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Comments (8)
I would not cull the taddies, they will be thinned out naturally. You may well get a bigger spawning next year but if toads mature at the same rate as frogs the above taddies wont be breeding next year, all the '1' year old frogs I have seen are too small. I dont know if 2 year olds breed. Net a few mozzie and feed them to the fish, once the fish have cottoned on that these things are food feed them as you like. I dump the larvae into the inflowing stream and my fish swim up it to be first in line
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trancegemini_wa
20 years ago
Dragonflies are beautiful arent they? I get them in my garden too and love watching them flit about. genny as dee mentioned they eat bugs particularly mosquitoes so they are definitely good to have around. when I am in the pool they come right up to me and hover and check me out. they arent dangerous or threatening, but they are very curious. they are attracted to water particularly when they are breeding so if you have a pond or pool theyll be hanging around looking for a mate or to deposit their eggs.

TG
Robert_NSW
20 years ago
What purpose to humans serve?
Sparaxis
20 years ago
Ah Robert! I was going to make a similar comment myself. If we were put here to look after everything else on the planet, then we are failing miserable. I think it would be a terribly arrogant persepective on life to consider ourselves better than any other species, particularly one so beautiful as the Dragon Fly.
paradisi
20 years ago
what are dragon flies for?

to look good

to eat pests

to let you know you're doing some things right in your garden
User
20 years ago
"What purpose do humans serve?"

Well, to be gardeners of course!! LOL.

Cheers,
Dee.
corymbosa
20 years ago
The same as everything else in the garden. They act as a vectors to maintain and increase the presence of the genetic material they carry within the population's gene pool. Attractiveness and pest management are just ruses they use to make us feel guilty about killing them.

Personally, I find dragonflies a pleasant distraction from those pesky butterflies and their destructive offspring. Be happy they're there.
Jennie60
20 years ago
Does anyone remember the lovely animated movie "The Rescuers"? Probably late 60s, in which one of the main characters was a dragonfly named Evinrude (great name). We've got a great outdoor table ornament in the shape of a dragonfly - it's not hard to guess what we call it.

This is apropos of absolutely nothing, actually !
cattuss
20 years ago
I once rescued a dragonfly from a disused spiders web. I couldn't stand seeing it die for no reason (the spider had long gone probably eaten by something bigger). It was a very delicate operation to remove the web from its wings but once I did that it started to help by pulling it off the rest of its body like it knew what i was doing. Then it flew off into a tree hopefully to eat some mozzies
ashmeri
20 years ago
Wonderful, beautiful little creatures especially if you are sitting watching them with a granddaughter who is into fairies

Marion
User
20 years ago
We seem to have a few of them on our block some are as big as mini helicopters, others are just nice sizes and some are beautiful colours I have tried on many occasions to take photos of them but they must know I have a camera hanging around neck because as soon as they see me they are off though I did take a few of a blue one not long ago I will look it up and put it on the Gallery..

They are such a beautiful insect and I like that droning noise they make also I much prefer them to those hundreds of caterpillars I spend hours squashing every morning...Why do we have to have them just because they turn into pretty butterflies that is one insect I don't want in my garden, even the resident birds wont touch them. I tried feeding them to our chooks and they wont touch them dead or alive not that I can blame them..... Cheers..MM.

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