Then he'll duck inside and drum on the walls with his big claw. When the female enters he'll guide her down to the mating chamber, then slip back and shut the entrance with a mud plug. The female incubates her eggs for a fortnight, then returns to the surface to send her brood off on the big flood tide of the new or full moon. The young will mature in the estuary for four weeks, then return as subadults under the next new or full moon. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, even before the rise of dinosaurs, they patrolled steaming Carboniferous swamps on veined, translucent wings.
Dragonflies have enormous eyes, while the eyes of damselflies are smaller and set more widely apart.
Unlike dragonflies, which keep their wings open while resting, damselflies hold their wings together over their backs. Soon they'll be hawking insects and, according to some sources, showing good boys where the pickerel are and sewing the lips of bad boys shut. The elaborate subterranean design of a prairie-dog town includes bedrooms, latrines, birthing and nursing chambers, pantries, even cemeteries. In May look for youngsters as they stumble up into the sunlight for the first time in their six-week lives. Because prairie dogs eat forbs and grasses, they have been widely poisoned and shot in the mistaken belief that they compete with livestock.