​Dragonflies and damselflies are common but amazing creatures. They are amongst the earliest winged insects which evolved about 325 million years ago to eat land dwelling animals like spiders, silverfish and millipedes. At this time our ancestors were large lumbering amphibians like giant salamanders. (I suspect that some humans are reverting to that state).

 Dragonflies are expert fliers. They can fly straight up and down, hover like a helicopter and even mate mid-air. They catch their insect prey by grabbing it with their feet. They have the best vision in the insect world and may be able to see more colours than us. This may explain why dragonflies and damselflies have such colourful bodies, and why males of some species, are more colourful than females.
​Dragonflies and their larvae are aquatic and eat just about anything—tadpoles, mosquitoes, fish, other insect larvae and even each other. Adult dragonflies are top predators in the insect world, and apart from being caught by the odd bird, live a full adult life (from a week to a year depending on species).
​Dragonfly common names meant more when I learnt that they  referred to hunting methods.

Hawking - Most dragonflies capture their prey in flight, plucking live insects out of the air. By forming a basket of sorts with its legs, a dragonfly can overtake a fly or bee and simply scoop it up and pop it into its mouth, without stopping. Some, like darners and spread wings, will just open their mouths and swallow whatever they catch as they fly. Dragonflies that use hawking to catch their prey include darners, emeralds, gliders, and saddlebags. Unfortunately some common names can be misleading. Common names for Pantala flavescens are wandering glider, globe wanderer and globe skimmer.

​Sallying - Perching dragonflies will sit and watch for prey, and then rapidly sally forth to capture it as it passes by. Salliers include skimmers,perchers, clubtails, dancers, spread wings, and broad-winged damsels.

​Gleaning - Hovering over vegetation and snatching insects perched on plant leaves or stems. Most pond damselflies are gleaners.

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Net-winged insects like lacewings can be confused with damselflies. They evolved about 50 million years later as land hunters that do not need water for breeding. A way to detect them is to look for their antennae, that dragonflies and damselflies do not have. They are most active in the evening.

Greetings fellow Foxies,
It is amazing how a single question can open up a new world of knowledge.

When I photographed a couple of fly species pollinating sandalwood flowers, I noticed that the surface of their eyes had facets like gemstones, unlike the round shape of most insects.  I caught house and March flies (an easy task this time of the year) and found the same. Why is this so?.

I Googled insect vision and was blown away by a wealth of fascinating information that explains so much about insects and how they behave.

​​​Our eyes provide us with very clear coloured images with good depth perception and can detect fairly rapid changes of movement. We have two large movable eyes with lenses that can change shape and regulate light intake, and a sensitive retina that is backed up by large computing power.
Insects have compound eyes consisting of hundreds of single focus lenses that each have relatively few receptors (ommatidia). Most don't see very clearly but they are good at detecting movement. Ommatidia are packed together in a hexagonal, pentagonal or occasionally square array.

​Most insects have a less comprehensive colour range than us and don't differentiate orange and red. However they can see ultraviolet colours that we can't. Many flowers have ultraviolet pigments that we can't see, but make patterns specifically designed to attract pollinators. Similarly insect eye colours act a sunglasses that filter out some colours and make their targets and predators more visible.
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There are many tweaks that different insect have to adapt their vision to their lifestyle.
To get a full understanding please have a look at these fascinating blogs? 

• Through the compound eye.
• Insect vision.

​None of this explains why many flies have gemstone facet eyes. A possible link is that they are all fast flying insects that often interact with animals The facets enable more individual ommatidia to provide better focus in fewer directions that would enable them to react faster to say a swatting hand or tail. The slower flying insects below all have more rounded eyes.

Dragonflies are an fast-flying exception but the following features greatly enhance their vision.

• Enormous eyes with more sensors per ommatidia. 
• A huge range of colour receptors, and have the fastest movement detecting ability (flicker fusion frequency).

They can detect 300 images per second compared to our 15 to 20.

Have you ever caught a flying dragonfly? 

Hello fellow Foxies,
I can still remember my delight as a child when I found a catasarcus weevil, put it on a finger, and felt it hanging on for dear life as I tried to remove it. Weevils are harmless, galumph along and look cute. This link provides an excellent introduction.

Weevils are a type of beetle; there are lots of them (over 6000 Australian species) and they are all vegans. The distinctive long snout (rostrum) is not used for sucking, as it has chewing mouthparts at the end. Many weevils are very selective about which plant (and often which part of the plant) they eat and often chew deep into the plant part to lay their eggs
a very general rule of thumb is the longer the snout the deeper the eggs are laid.
The Haplonyx species (pear-shaped weevil) was about to drill into a Drummonds mallee bud. 
​The file below describes the life cycle of another Haplonyx species

​In Foxes Lair I often see weevils on flowering Jacksonia plants. Here are some examples. I found the rare and beautiful Ctenaphides maculatus only once despite intensive searches.

Weevils vary greatly in sizes. Tiny Rhinolaccus ant mimic weevils live on acacias. Adults chew the stems and grub type larvae burrow inside the plants. Other small weevils include agricultural pests such as desiantha weevils and closely related vegetable weevils.

Surprisingly, closely related species may have different types of larvae. For example desiantha weevil larvae are pale grubs that chew grass roots, while vegetable weevils  have greenish above-ground slug-like grubs that chew leaves like the adults.
Large weevils are similar. Catasarcus weevil larvae chew eucalypt roots, and Leptopius species (wattle pigs) chew acacia roots. Both pupate underground. This Foxypress recounts fossilised Leptopius pupal cases (clogs) that I found at Mukinbudin.

Last spring I was on the hunt for an insect that causes a distinctive leaf damage, they make great photos when the sun is behind the leaf, and finally found the strange slug-like larva of Gonipterus eucalypt weevils. To discourage predators they exude a horrible oily liquid to cover their body and decorate it with their frass (poo). They still get parasitised.

Oxyops species weevils have similar larva but eat melaleucas.

​Hello fellow Foxies,
An egg mass on a leaf took me on a journey of learning about the world of hoppers.
Planthoppers, leafhoppers, treehoppers and froghoppers are all small bugs that suck sap from plants.
They belong to the order Hemiptera (sucking insects that are called homopterans)
Suborders include
Heteroptera: (typical bugs like stink bugs that suck plants or animal suckers such as bedbugs, and assassin bugs.
Sternorrhyncha: aphids, whiteflies, and scale insects
Auchenorrhyncha: cicadas, leafhoppers, treehoppers, planthoppers, and spittlebugs (adults called froghoppers)

Hoppers have aerodynamically shaped adult bodies and most have an exceptional hopping ability to escape from predators. The nymphs are generally tiny. There is great confusion around hopper names. For example the commonly named two-lined treehopper below is in the leafhopper genus.
Adult leafhoppers (Family Cicadellidae) have torpedo-shaped bodies and wings that tend to be flat on the body. I have found the three species below. The brown leafhopper lives in an ant nest and is tended by ants.

I am yet to find a froghopper. They are more often seen as their strange nymphs called spittlebugs

​My interest in hoppers started with attractive white blobs that appeared in January on box poison leaves in Foxes Lair. They were planthopper egg masses with a white waxy cover. Planthoppers have mostly narrow heads with large compound eyes separated by a ridge. I was yet to find an adult planthopper and eagerly monitored the blobs for emerging juveniles. 

​Alas I never witnessed the wonderful hatching time. The egg masses were empty, or they had 1mm black spots in the mass that looked like parasite eggs.
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I put a leaf with spotty egg mass in a glass jar and sure enough tiny 2mm blackish wasps appeared. This species is just one of thousands of stingless parasitoid chalcid wasps that keep insect numbers in control. 

Amazingly there are even tinier (from 0.1mm; a printed full stop is about 0.3mm!) hyperparasitic wasps that keep chalcid wasp numbers down by laying their eggs on the other wasp’s eggs. I won’t be getting a photo of these anytime soon!