A question was asked – who would win in a fight, a dragonfly or a wasp? Here is the short answer – it is a trick question!
As a starting point, the two insects are built quite
differently. Both, of course, have the same insect body plan: an abdomen, a
thorax with 4 wings and 6 legs, and a head with eyes, jaws, antennae, and
whatever else insects have there. Beyond this generalization, however, a dragonfly
and a wasp are built differently.
A dragonfly is built for speed. It is the cheetah of
the insect world. Unlike the tall cat, however, a dragonfly has endurance as
well as speed, as it spends all of its adult life flying around, looking for
food and mates. Dragonflies are not territorial… unlike their damselfly
cousins, which are: males of those insects have a perch/an established territory,
and they keep each other out of it, but damselflies are not as good fliers as
dragonflies are. Moreover, we are talking primarily about dragonflies here.
Wasps are more territorial, meanwhile. There are two
main wasp types: the solitary and the social, and here we are talking about the
social species, such as the paper wasp and the hornet. They are as carnivorous
as any dragonfly is, but are also social, while dragonflies are not.
What is more important, though, is that while
dragonflies are built for speed, as the cheetahs are, the wasps and hornets are
built for strength instead, (as the lions and tigers are). Moreover, not unlike
the lions, wasps are known to cooperate with each other, though along different
lines than those of the vertebrate lions. To wit: while wasp nests are more
numerous than the lion prides, the bonds between the lions are stronger, because,
well, the lions live longer – for years, while in temperate climates wasps die
at the end of fall/beginning of winter – only the wasp queens survive. (I.e.
the wasp analogues of the bee queens).
…The dragonflies, it can be argued, do not fair much
different: they also die in winter, and only their eggs, or larvae, survive the
winter. Unlike the wasps, however, they do not have a pupa stage: when they are
ready to transition from water to air, they crawl out of the water onto a tall
cattail or reed, and burst from their back – literally: the skin on their backs
bursts, and the adult dragonfly crawls out of its’ last larval skin. Alien
xenomorphs, top that.
Getting back to our face-off, the dragonfly can fly,
well, rings around a bulkier wasp, but unless it is really bigger than the wasp
is, it will not tackle the wasp, and we are talking literal tackling here.
A wasp hunts with its’ sting, (in a manner of
speaking): when a wasp finds its’ prey, (a spider, a caterpillar, a honeybee –
it is different with different wasp species), it jumps onto its’ prey and paralyses’
it with the stinger. Then the wasp takes its’ prey to its’ nest, where it
either feeds the prey to the larva, (as the social wasps do), or puts it into a
storage, and lays its egg, so that the larva would eat the
spider/caterpillar/etc. later, (as the solitary wasps do).
Meanwhile, dragonflies have no stingers – they just
rush at their prey, seize it with their legs and eat it. The legs of
dragonflies are hairy and spiky, useless for working, just fine for perching,
and when the dragonflies fold them, their legs form a fine net/basket for
catching insects such as mosquitoes and butterflies, but against powerful wasps
– not so much. Venomous stingers aside, wasps and bees are just too heavy and
strong for dragonflies, and the dragonflies do not mess with them.
Robber flies sometimes do. Despite being, well,
flies, and as such, related to houseflies and mosquitoes, the robber flies live
more like the dragonflies, being active hunters, especially as adults. A
scientist once put a robber fly against a bumblebee. For a while, the former
seemed to be gaining the upper hand, until the bumblebee unleashed its stinger
and went on the counterattack. The robber fly quickly played possum and the
bumblebee got away. Considering that the robber flies have a venomous bite of
their own, and the dragonflies do not have it, the fight between a dragonfly
and a bumblebee – or a wasp, for that matter – would have been over even
quicker.
Therefore, getting back to the initial question: who
would win, the dragonfly, or the wasp, the answer is the wasp. However, since a
dragonfly would never tackle it, this answer is theoretical overall.
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