While students walk unsuspectingly across the bridge of the campus pond, a small egg is laid in the underwater forest. The egg floats to the bottom, and after a while a larva crawls out. It lives under water for no less than a year, until it turns into a full-fledged water sniffer and flies into the air in the spring.
Dozens of bright blue toothpicks with black stripes, which seem to glow in the sun, ‘sniff’ just above the water surface of the campus pond. They like ‘clean’ water, says ecologist Garry Bakker of Bureau Stadsnatuur, and this ‘bare bucket of concrete’ has that. The pond has been there for a little over ten years, so it has not yet collected much organic material.
The water sniffer is busy at the pond. Like a hunter, he whizzes back and forth, looking for food. That’s enough with this, as Bakker calls it, ‘tropical rainforest under water’. The submerged aquatic plants – plants that are largely submerged – are home to all kinds of snacks, such as bugs and mosquitoes. And every now and then he zooms past the gigantic eyes of a large emperor dragonfly that is laying eggs between a water plant with its back bent.
That reminds him of his perhaps most important mission: to find a female, and fast. Since he surfaced, he has a maximum of a few months to live and pass on his genes. But it doesn’t seem that difficult for this animal to find a partner in the short term, because if you look closely you will see several ‘tandems’ flying: amorous, glued-together squirrels, which sometimes form a heart with their bodies.
Together with the female, which often has a different color, it flies to a good place to deposit the fertilized eggs under water. The eggs float to the bottom and, yes, you know how the rest goes.
2023-07-17 08:42:14
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