Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 305, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1910 — BREED DRAGONFLY [ARTICLE]

BREED DRAGONFLY

Mosquitoes’ Most Deadly and Unrelenting Foe. Experiments Being Made at Bronx Park to Determine Advisability of Raising Insects to Destroy Little Singing Pests. New York.—" Some experiments are being made at Bronx park to determine whether It would be a good investment for the government to breed dragon flies to destroy mosquitoes,” said a tall, elderly man who sat in a boat on the Little Bronx river at One Hundred and Eighty-flfth street and Boston road the other day. He was William Conroy, an employe of the zoological department of Harvard, and is spending his vacation in and about New York and Jersey City taking notes on the mosquito. “Not everyone knows,” he said, “that the dragon fly is the worst natural enemy that the mosquito has. Both of them are born in the water, and both wriggle arounfl in the spud |md oose till the time comes fer them to emerge. Then they come obt on the stock of a dry trffSn the hot sun and split their skin down the back and emerge from it with wings, “The dragon fly has a wonderful lower jaw that shoots out like an arm and can grab almost anything that comes its way, but what it likes better than anything else is a mosquito. “A few years ago I was out on the plains of Wyoming at a rather high altitude and near some wet land where mosquitoes simply seemed to eat us alive. Late in the afternoon they came swarming around us as the sun sank, and made life a torment I was with a troop of United States soldiers, and we had camped for the night and

built a fire to smoke the mosquitoes away, but it did little good. While we sat there slapping at the pests there came a sudden dispersing of them. In a second’s time almost there wasn’t one of them in sight We all noticed it. Then, darting from side to Side and flying around the camp, came the dragon flies, six or eight of them, with their big, shining bodies and tremulous gauze wings making a pretty picture In the afternoon haze. “An old Indian guide who was in the party was the first to point out the dragon flies and tell us that the mosquitoes had been afraid of them. A little after the dragon flies bad gone and back came the mosquitoes. Then after a little the flies came back, a dozen of them this time, stretched out across the plain in line of battle IB feet apart and each one advancing and darting from side to side in quick dashes. Every dash meant a mosquito killed and eaten, and it was no wonder that the mosquitoes fled. “A few years ago the question was seriously taken up at the Museum of Natural History and at the Smithsonian in Washington of whether it‘ would not pay to breed dragon flies, or devil’s darning needles, as the grandmothers üßed to call them, to rid the country of mosquitoes. The investigations were called off for some Reason and never pursued, —ii"l a lady out in Cambridge who breedß a lot of dragon fljes in an aquarium on her back porch every summer Just to keep the mosquitoes away. After breeding they hnn g around the porch all summer close to the water, where they were hatched, and she never has to use screens. While I sat there on the porch under the honeysuckle one evening I counted 16 dragon flies on the walls or vines—but never a mosquito.”