These spots–all dragonflies have these. They're called stigma we've got the four
spots, therefore spotted skimmers. And
then we will disperse around water. I
think people find it a lot more
interesting than being in class and just
learning about it, because you get
hands-on experience and and you get to
know, like, sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. And usually when you
learn about things, you only learn about
the things that work. Not every day is
going to be a day where you're gonna
find a bunch of dragonflies and
damselflies. 
Yep, so does this mean we have epic
failure? No it means that we need to come
out and collect again, right? You know we
always look forward to these days where
we get to go out and actually do
hands-on activities like dragonfly
hunting and it's just it's exciting. And
it's fine. Okay, so male or female? That
looks like a fella yeah yeah get your
sleeve. He's big, so put him in feet-first.
seeing that their information is going
to be used by scientists, they're very
serious about it. They have their hand
lenses, they're able to determine the sex
of the dragonflies. They're able to key
them out to figure out ,you know, what
group they belong to, so then you see a
stripe, it's it's neat to see that they
even police each other on getting
accurate results. Male. That is a male
male dragonfly. We went out and we are
observing the migratory dragonflies and
we recorded on the data sheet that was
given to us through Odonata Central,
of the five migratory dragonflies, and we
went out
for a period of say 22 or 25 minute, and
the kids recorded their result.
Citizen science is really important to
my work in addition to inspiring me to
become a scientist I use the help of
many citizen scientists. And the
surveying work that I participate in,
we're looking to see which species live
where. Scientific research involves a lot
of collaborations.
Kurt Mead is a dragonfly expert, state
park interpretive naturalist, and is the
person that created Minnesota's
dragonfly citizen science program. He's
also my mentor and friend. I started as a
citizen scientist and through Kurt's
mentorship and support I began to
develop my own research questions and
I'm now working towards earning my PhD.
This one's called the four spotted
skimmer and their spots we're talking
about are here, here, there. And they're on
the same side these spots. All
dragonflies have these. These are called
stigma. Yeah, you can see it breathing.
It's got dozens of little holes up and
down the bottom of the abdomen, and it's
actually inhaling and exhaling.
A bog can be a challenging place to to
do research. One reason, I think you can
see them flying all around me, are the
black flies and the deer flies. That's
why I'm wearing a scarf protecting my
ears and my neck and I wear a hat and
long sleeves that's pretty good for
protecting me from the flies.
So dragonflies spend most of their lives
underwater as aquatic nymphs and I like
to look in these small ponds in the bogs
using an aquatic net to see if I can't
scoop up some of the baby nymphs and see
where they are and how old they are. So
I'm going to try and see if I can't find
one right now using this net. So I kind
of dip it in the water and I shake it a
little bit as I move it along the bottom,
and then I can set my net down and pick
through it and see if I can find any
nymphs. They're really hard to find in
the bog. Here's a very very very tiny one
this is a baby dragon fly. In the
winter my team and I cut a hole in the
ice to find nymphs.
If I study in dragonflies year-round, we
learn about how baby dragonflies survive
in both winter and summer. Our hands may
get cold, but at least there are no
flies biting us in the winter.
So how we can start identifying this? A
lot of them have these bright emerald
green eyes–not all of them do, but
there's very few other species that have
this emerald green metallic markings. And
then, here's the kicker, but everything in
the emerald family has got this little
yellow band right there, so this one is
the American emerald. Not only are the
kids that are involved in citizen
science participating to learn and to
have fun but they're really helping us
researchers. There's no way that the
handful of researchers could gather all
of the information and the knowledge
without the help of citizen scientists.
And when I work with school groups and
families, the absolute best catchers of
the difficult to catch dragonflies are
always the kids. With the athleticism and
the reckless abandon of kids with nets,
leads to their success.
A bunch of 14, 15, 16 year old kids out with a net, and nothing's going to get away.
Yeah, I don't usually call it work.
I usually call it play it play.
