Slashdot Mirror
Ocean-Crossing Dragonflies Discovered
grrlscientist writes "While living and working as a marine biologist in Maldives, Charles Anderson noticed sudden explosions of dragonflies at certain times of year. He explains how he carefully tracked the path of a plain, little dragonfly called the Globe Skimmer, Pantala flavescens, only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world."
I can think of worse places to study :)
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
Up to now, all the marine biologists that have attempted to track insect migration have drown. I wonder what this guy's secret is?
There just isn't much room for energy storage inside a dragonfly. They must have commendably efficient ways of staying in the air, presumably a combination of powered flight and exploitation of available air currents.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of them survive.
http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_anderson_discovers_dragonflies_that_cross_oceans.html
Was it called the Globe Skimmer before his discovery? If so, it was quite a prescient name.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
How many would it take to carry a coconut?
article can be read in a minute, but a fucking video can go for hours. next time please warn if video, if I want a fucking multimedia experience I'll download some porn....
Well listen, someday
You'll hear a rush of wings
So distant, a sound of secret things
There, look there, up in that rusty sky
Yonder, sweeps the dragonfly
So awesome, he blocks the setting sun
He'll come to collect the souls of everyone
Come dragon, come
In from the sun
He floats with an eerie grace
A giant blue green sentinal
From some distant time and space
And because he'll come, he'll have no regrets
Surely he'll come to lay this birth to rest
I know one day you'll see him
But please don't ask me why
He will be a secret dragonfly
Fly dragon fly, here from the sky
So if you hear that sound I'm talkin' about
When you know he's near
When your times run out
Well don't you fear
There's nothing that you can say
Cause he'll appear and take you to that special place
He'll take you there
Sorry. One just killed me in Midkemia and pissed me off. Otherwise they're okay.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
...but up until now the scientific tracking tools were too heavy and the dragonflies all fell into the ocean and drowned. Why, it was only 10 years ago that advances in tracking devices caused scientists to discover that dragonflies could actually fly.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
A european dragonfly, or an african dragonfly?
Wow, that Matthew Dillon sure knows how to optimize the kernel & FS for long-term stability!
Compare that to a mascot that is confined to one geographic area, like, say, a penguin? ::rimshot::
(Hey I warned you it was lame. Write your own.)
This is really cool stuff. It reminded me of some stuff I read before of locust swarms migrating across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. But in that case, evidence (a shit load of dead locust washing onto shore) suggested that locust kept dying and the rest of the swarm ate their corpses for fuel and/or used their dead bodies as 'islands'. Just remember that the largest locust swarms are in the billions and cover hundreds of square kilometers on land...
Anyhow, here's a linky to a National Geographic article (it also suggests the original American populations of locusts were immigrants from across the ocean).
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1228_051228_locusts.html
I saw this video on TED a couple of weeks ago (I don't visit TED regularly). My guess is that it would have been presented in TED India conference, which was months ago. Is slashdot getting sluggish?
only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world."
...known to man! It’s like a doctor stating “there is no cure” (Implying “and there never will be. Ever.”) When what he should have said, is “I personally have never heard of a cure. But maybe it’s just because I would never think about learning something new, because I think I already know everything. After all, I’m god!”
(This no critique of anything or anyone other, than that part of the quote, and the person who wrote it.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm not a grammer nazi because I can't tell the difference between a dash and a hyphen, but if one of the two had been placed between 'ocean' and 'crossing', parsing the headline would've been a lot easier. At first I thought the ocean was the subject.
The level of writing these days...
Were they African or European dragonflies?
I did not know that Opera debugger could open wings and go from Europe to America by air and catch some bugs on there.
comments about never using the typeface Papyrus - which, indeed, is a hideous font... and used in the banner of the webpage of TFA...
Ask Me About... The 80's!