Unlike butterflies who hide and protect their transformation inside a chrysalis, Dragonflies transform right out in the open. The Dragonfly crawls out of the water, where it has spent the majority of it's life, the exoskeleton then cracks open and releases the insect’s soft body and wings. It’s messy. It’s public. It's dangerous. Many die. It's also a kind of vulnerability necessary, it seems, to become an extraordinary creature. Th fact that Dragonflies were some of the first winged insects to evolve, some 325 million years ago, it seems to be a strategy that works.
