“Dragonfly,” he said.

“Mm?” said Jenny.

“Dragonfly,” Mike repeated.

“What about it?”

Jenny turned her head to look at him through her sunglasses.

“Nothing,” Mike said, “Just I just saw one and it reminded me of when I was a kid, back where I used to live. There was this lake and we used to cycle down to it and sometimes it had all these dragonflies over it, hundreds of them.”

“Oh,” said Jenny.

“I guess they used to hatch there.”

“Yeah,” said Jenny, sitting up. “Pass me that lemonade please.”

Mike passed her the bottle. As she drank from it, through a straw, Jenny watched the plane skitter through the air like some demented insect, all the time droning its mosquito-whine.

“I wish that plane would shut up,” Jenny said, screwing the cap back on the bottle, laying back down.

Mike looked at the plane. He was still thinking about the dragonflies.

“We used to throw stones at them sometimes,” Mike said.

“At what?” said Jenny.

“The dragonflies. We used to throw stones at them, and sometimes we hit them, but usually we missed.”

“Oh,” said Jenny.

A breeze drew back the leaves in the tree above.

“The sun’s moved,” Jenny said, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glare, in spite of her sunglasses.

Mike looked at her.

“Once there were these two dragonflies fucking, kind of flying around with their tails stuck together, and I threw a stone at them and it hit them.”

Jenny was wriggling back on the grass, trying to get back into where the tree’s shade had moved to. Mike was still looking at her.

“They kind of spiralled down into the water then, like, we used to call them helicopter seeds, what are they?”

Jenny saw Mike was looking at her and shrugged her bare shoulders. One of the children on the field cheered as his brother sent the cricket ball arching through the air.

“Sycamore seeds,” said Mike, “these two dragonflies went spiralling down into the lake like two sycamore seeds that had got stuck together.”

Jenny shuffled, trying to get comfortable. Mike had not moved.

“I guess they drowned or something,” he said. He paused. “Don’t you think that’s cruel?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said, “it’s cruel.”

“But not cruel like this kid Harry used to be though. He caught one of them once and you know how some kids like to pull the wings off flies or the legs off spiders or whatever?”

“Mm,” Jenny said.

“Well, he got this dragonfly and he pulled two of its wings off on one side, and left it with the two on the other side. Somehow that was worse, ’cause it just kind of flapped around pathetically and rolled over. Harry watched it, but I couldn’t stand it, so I got a rock and crushed it.”

The plane banked around again. Jenny propped herself up on her elbow and watched it.

“That was cruel, pulling two wings off like that, wasn’t it?” Mike said.

“Yeah,” said Jenny, “I wish that damn plane would shut up. I don’t get what the point in it is, flying it around and around in circles like that.”

Mike watched the plane and the man flying the plane, and then he looked past him at the father playing cricket with his kids, and then he thought about the two dragonflies drowning in the lake, and about the one broken half-winged dragonfly crushed into the earth.

Harvestmen are my least favourite of all creatures. They just look like they shouldn’t exist, and they really freak me out.

So I batted this one away and it fell to the floor and started running across the carpet. I went to get a glass and by the time I returned it was nowhere to be seen. Understandable really, when they’re so obscenely gangly that they don’t even cast a shadow. I was determined, however, to catch it, since I wouldn’t be able to sleep with it in the room.

Let me make it clear though, that I’m not scared of them. I don’t have any kind of arachnophobia (and, by the way, although harvestman are arachnids, they’re only very distantly related to spiders), but there’s something about harvestmen that just make me shudder. It’s their legs mostly; I just can’t understand how anything with that little substance can move. And the worst part is, they have so many of them that they leave them behind willy nilly.

Eventually I caught this one since it made a mad dash across my floor, towards my bed, and gently slid a piece of paper under the glass to trap it. Despite my efforts of gentleness, one of it’s legs fell off, and just lay there next to it. Apparently they continue to twitch once detached as well, which I’m glad I didn’t see. Surely that’s not natural though; any other creature would be “wah, I’ve lost my leg,” and at least slow down or bleed, but no, not these obscene things.

Once caught, I threw it out the window, and shut it tight. I realise it’s unlikely the thing would have tried to get back inside, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.

Here’s the Wikipedia article if you want to find out any more about these…things.

In order to survive they need a meal about once every two days. A live meal. So every couple of days I have to grab a jam-jar and piece of cardboard and see if I can catch a fly or a moth or something. Actually getting the insect I catch into the cage with the mantises is something of a chore, as you can imagine, since both insects are continually trying to escape.

So I caught this housefly earlier (I assume it was a housefly because it was a fly and it was in my house) and spent a good twenty minutes trying to coax it to its death. Eventually I got it in and the Mantis caught it, just look in a David Attenborough documentary brought to life.

I decided to watch the Mantis eat its meal, a little macabre perhaps, but interesting nonetheless. Two things struck me about this spectacle:

Firstly, flies stay alive for a long time when being eaten. I know the mantis doesn’t have a poisonous bite or sting like a lot of predatory insects do, but I still assumed it would kill its prey quickly with a bite to the neck to make eating it easier, like lions do. But no, the mantis started on the side of the fly, just working its way into it. And the fly just kept on waving its legs, flapping its one free wing. It’s really quite grim to see something that’s almost half-eaten still alive.

But not as grim as the second thing that struck me about watching this: as the mantis bit away at the side of the fly, these little white maggoty worms started falling out of the fly and wriggling around on the floor. At first I wondered if these were the fly’s offspring, but flies lay eggs. And these things were really quite repulsive, each about 2mm long, writhing around on the bottom of the cage. One of them got onto the mantis as well, and wriggled over its eye. I would not have eaten that fly if I was a mantis, I’d have just thrown it down the second anything like that came out of it.

So what were these wormy things? Well, I can only assume that they were some sort of parasite. I had a look on Yahoo! answers and found this, which seems to be something similar. Really, how nasty is that, to be full of chunky parasites and not being able to do anything about it except carry on as normal? Ugh. Just thought I’d share that with you all.