One thing I could not find, even with several Web searches, was a picture of dragonfly eggs, laid in water. What I was actually hoping for was a picture of them on a lily pad. (For obvious reasons!)
Got to say, the descriptons of the eggs in the previous post were most helpful! I'd been looking at some egg masses on quite a few waterlily pads and was thinking these were probably dragonfly eggs, but wasn't sure.
Kind of like frog egss, only much smaller? Sort of a gelled mass of little black dots? If these are indeed dragonfly eggs, I'll stop removing them from the pads. (I like dragonflys!) I was a little suspicious that they could be some other kind of insect, maybe some kind of waterlily pad-eating little monster. I've had the usual attacks by the China Mark Moth larvae, which is easily dealt with, but one old pond has submerged pads that develope rather large cut-outs on them, before they even reach the surface. Some of these cuts are taken out of the edge, some are within the pad, like cookie cutter holes. This is something I'd not seen before.
Since the patio ponds were put in and the plants started growing, the dragonfly population went from "a few here and there," to what sometimes looks like the attack on Pearl Harbor. I can sit for hours just watching them.
Mike S.
Spring Hill, FL
