I’ve always enjoyed it when dragonflies visited the garden, but I realized I didn’t know much about them.

I knew that dragonflies had finely tuned, 360-degree vision, because I knew how hard it was to get close enough to them for a photo. I knew they were territorial, because one of them took ownership of the tip of our car antenna for about a week whenever it was parked in the driveway. I’d seen photos of their Jurassic Period fossils, and I marveled at accounts of their ancestors with their 3-foot wingspans. But that’s about all I’d learned about dragonflies, and so recently I went about filling in the gaps of my knowledge.

What I found was a world so weird and disturbing, I have to wonder if maybe ignorance is bliss. The weirdness begins when they are immature nymphs, living underwater (you have been forewarned):

Weird Facts about Dragonfly Nymphs

They breathe through gills in their rectum.
They propel themselves by shooting water out of their anuses.
To prevent contamination of their own water supply, their fecal matter comes out neatly pre-packaged in a membrane.
Some species of nymphs can fire these poop-pellets a distance of 20 feet (no one knows why this would be of benefit).
When threatened, some nymphs will play dead.
They are cannibals, as are the adults.
If they lose a leg, they can sprout a new one on the next molt.
The adults are no less bizarre:

Weird Facts about Dragonfly Adults

Males have two sex organs. Before mating, they move the sperm from one to the other—from the tip of the abdomen to the mid-section.
When ready to mate, the male grabs the female by the head, and they fly in tandem. Sometimes he accidentally scratches her or pokes a hole in her head doing this, though she will usually survive such trauma.
Before mating, the male will try to scoop out from the female the sperm of any other males that may have beaten him to the punch.
When mating actually begins, the male and female are linked in a “copulation wheel” that loosely resembles a heart shape. (Awwww.)
To regulate their body temperature, some dragonflies can change color.
Some take part in migrations of hundreds or even thousands of miles.