Hairy wings

I have been trying to get a shot of the hairy wings for quite some time now. The shot required a combination of lighting and viewing angle, plus getting close enough and making the shot interesting. It may help to go large.

This shot shows two features: the hairy wings (discussed below) and the hairs on the back of the head and neck. These are probably to prevent dust or grit getting trapped behind the head, which would cause major problems and likely prevent the dragon from hunting.

Significance of hairy wings (a bit techy so I forgive you for not reading!) - Due to my interest in vortex theory from my fishing lure activities, my aircraft design background and my recent interest in dragonflies, I have done a fair bit of reading of scientific documents on dragonfly flight theory. A surprising amount of work is being done in this area, mainly due to the militaries desire for smaller unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's) and the money that they are throwing around.

It is easy for us to think that all these scientific bods have got it all down, after all, we have been to the moon, we can wipe out whole cities with the press of a button, we have electrickery and even tinternet. But there are some glaringly basic questions that science has not yet fully answered, the two main subjects being how do insects fly and even more embarrassing, how do fish swim. For example, one of life's big unanswered questions was 'why do fish have scales'. This question was only answered as recently as 2007 and still remains to be proven. The answer didn't come from a university, but from a layman just like you or me.

The science community has known about the dragonflies hairy wings (microtrichia) for fifty years, but dismissed them as being irrelevant. Today's scientists seem to be ignoring them also, on the say so of the old findings based on laminar flow flight theory. Now the science world understands that insects use vortex flow and so the old findings are no longer applicable, but still they ignore the hairs. Three hundred million years of evolution has put hairs on every dragonfly on the planet, surely that is a clue that the hairs might be important!

As soon as I saw the hairs, I knew exactly how they worked, in fact they work the same as fish scales, allowing the wing to push against the rotating vortex airflow, just like the scales push against the water vortex flow. If I wasn't so crap at maths, I would be tempted to go back to school and prove it myself!

Dave