I'm back at the Angelo Reserve this weekend. Today while looking for algae I watched a dragonfly take flight for the first time. Dragonflies live most of their life in the water as a nymph. In rivers and streams they are predators that eat other insects and small fish. Eventually they emerge from the river as adults to mate and become the aerial predators we are more familiar with. You can see the remains of the nymph exoskeleton below the adult dragonfly. In the first photographs the wings are over the abdomen, then later the dragonfly moved them to their functional position perpendicular to the body. I watched this for 20 minutes until eventually the wings started fluttering and the dragonfly took off.