Dragonflies Heading South Putting On A Show Seen From Space

Flying Dragons!!!   Is it Game of Thrones revisited?  Not exactly.  There is a swarm of insects on the move in America, so large that it's making news headlines!

So why do we care?

The insects are dragonflies and the dragonfly just happens to be the State Insect of Washington State.  Now the swarm is swarming nowhere near here, but it's interesting none-the-less, especially when you consider its size!

How big is the swarm? It's so large that as it travels across the southeastern United States, it has actually been picked up on weather radar!

The Daily Mail reports that "The National Weather Service spotted the 'unusual imagery' and made forecasters believe rain clouds had formed, however the large blob that stretched from Virginia to North Carolina was in fact an enormous swam of the insects."

The migratory draonfly partnership website says dragonfly migrations are common but little is know about them. "In North America, migrations are seen annually in late summer and early fall, when thousands to millions of insects stream southward along coasts, lake shores, and mountain ridges from Canada down to Mexico and the West Indies, passing along both coasts of the United States and through the Midwest. Movement back north is less obvious, but we know it occurs because mature adult dragonflies appear early in spring at places where overwintering resident immatures (nymphs) have not yet emerged."

Safe travels dragonflies, we'll need you back here next spring because the mosquitoes will be back too!