Dragonflies

Australia | 1' 43"

directed by Ian Gibbins

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synopsis 

For several days in December, 2022, Adelaide and surrounding areas swarmed with large dragonflies, that had bred in the very wet spring of 2022. In this video, I've used a frame echo process to track and digitally illuminate the flight paths of the dragonflies as they fly around our garden in Belair, South Australia.

The soundtrack includes some of our native birds that were calling at the time: rainbow lorikeets, a grey shrike-thrush, Australian magpies, red wattlebirds, New Holland honeyeaters, and kookaburras, as well as passing human traffic. The flower in the final sequence is a kangaroo paw, native to Western Australia.

Dragonflies have some of the most accomplished aerial abilities of any animal: they are both fast and manoeuvrable. Associated with this, they have an advanced visual system, capable of seeing a wide range of colours as well as polarised light with very high resolution. All this allows them to be aggressive predators of other flying insects. Their larvae are fully aquatic and are also fierce predators, living mostly on aquatic invertebrates, such as mosquito larvae, but they are also capable of catching and eating tadpoles. It's a very successful strategy: dragonflies evolved this basic body plan about 250 million years ago!