My home in Batangas is made mostly of bamboo. There is no air conditioning and no screens on the windows or doors. Most of the spaces are open. We have plenty of plants on the grounds around the house and a swamp next door which only got swampier from the last typhoon. So guests sometimes ask, why don’t you have lots of mosquitoes?
Dragonflies is the one-word answer.
We discovered this natural solution by accident. When we built our home more than a decade ago, we assumed we would have mosquitoes. But after a while we realized we didn’t need mosquito nets. There would be the occasional mosquito but not enough for us to consider it a nuisance. I myself don’t recall ever being bitten there, although I understand these pests tend to choose their victims.
Then I saw a reel by a scientist vlogger who extolled the dragonfly as the apex predator of mosquitoes. A eureka light bulb switched on.
I went to our little water garden in the back where I saw pretty dragonflies hovering around the plants. They could be so docile that you could take pictures of them resting on your hand or even on your nose, as the accompanying photos from my water garden show.
But when it came to mosquitoes, they were apparently ferocious, transformed into biological fighter jets with laser beam focus on their favorite prey.
Apex predator — I loved the sound and meaning of that, calling the charming, often unnoticed, and definitely under-appreciated dragonfly something usually associated with lions and sharks.
I looked it up and sure enough, there is already plenty of research proving that not only are dragonflies, and their zoological cousins damselflies, voracious hunters of mosquitoes, they are perhaps the most efficient predators in the whole animal kingdom.
Compared to much larger and more notorious animals, dragonflies have superior hunting success rates, as high as 95 percent, compared to the 30 percent of lions and the 48 percent of great white sharks. Hunting success rate is defined in zoology as “the percentage of captures in a number of initiated hunts.”
Since unlike other predators dragonflies don’t include humans as part of their menu, they can seem benign and even meek to us. But make no mistake, they are built for aggression. Their large eyes can see almost 360 degrees and can focus on a single mosquito in a swarm of them. Their four wings enable them to maneuver much better than nearly any other winged creature. As some of us have probably observed, they can stay still above their prey before striking and brake almost instantly. No bird of prey can do that.
They can eat more than their weight, as many as a hundred mosquitoes in a single day.
In an article in the Journal of Animal Ecology, scientists led by Tharaka S. Priyadarshana reviewed dozens of studies on dragonflies and concluded that there is “strong evidence that dragonflies/damselflies can be effective biological control agents of mosquitoes, and environmental planning to promote them could lower the risk of spreading mosquito-borne diseases in an environmentally friendly and cost-effective manner.”
If they can effectively “control” mosquitoes (a nice term to mean killing large numbers of them), then why aren’t dragonflies being propagated more widely for that purpose? Instead, many people and even government health programs resort to spraying toxic chemicals into our living and work spaces.
“A lot of us do not immediately think of dragonflies as being essential to the ecosystem,” public health expert Dr. Katrina Gomez-Chua told me. “We are often trained to jump to other means of controlling mosquitoes such as getting rid of their habitats or using pesticides, but we don't usually think of using what nature intended, which is their natural predators.”
Chemical solutions are also heavily marketed, influencing decision makers and consumers the world over.
While dragonflies are among the most effective predators, mosquitoes have been by far the most prolific killers of humans in history.
In a recent book entitled “The Mosquito,” the historian Timothy Winegard estimates that mosquitoes have killed 52 billion people, more than all wars in history combined. To this day with all of our scientific advances, we have not been able to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue. Yet here is the untapped, unheralded dragonfly, atop the pyramid of predators.
There is a catch — dragonflies need clean water bodies to breed and thrive, unlike mosquitoes which can survive even in polluted canal water. Once hatched, dragonfly nymphs become predators of mosquito larvae in the water. So even before they’re hunted in the air, mosquito wigglers are already food for baby dragonflies.
But first you need to keep water bodies clean for dragonflies to propagate. That’s a powerful incentive for environmental cleanliness — fewer deadly critters buzzing around your head at night.
You can also build yourself a dragonfly haven, like my little water garden in the backyard. These friends of humans can harmlessly land on your nose after patrolling your surroundings for any pesky mosquitoes.
After I told a visiting pal, the writer Luis Francia, about this little known dragonfly superpower, he suggested a new motto for our place, “Tutubi or not to be.”