We were on vacation last week in Michigan’s sunny Upper Peninsula. On the way through, we stopped off at an old lighthouse situated at the end of a longish peninsula jutting south into Lake Michigan. Oddly enough, there were tons of huge dragonflies hanging out along the beach. Now, I know that birds will often stop to rest at the end of a peninsula during migration before flying across the water, so I wondered if the dragonflies were doing the same.
Do dragonflies migrate? Or was this just a particularly good time and place for them to be living?
What other insects migrate? The only ones I’m aware of are monarch butterflies, so obviously some insects do migrate.
It depends on your definition of migration. I don’t believe ants move from place to place on an annual, climate-influenced cycle the way some birds and butterflies do, but they do move en masse when they’ve exhausted the resources of a particular locality, and may return there after the resources have recovered.
While living in the 29 Palms, Joshua Tree, and Yucca Valley area, I have seen this first hand… and it is damn creepy.
What is strangest about it is that they are travel down paths that have been in use for years. If one of those paths cross your property, you can see one or two scury across your yard every couple minutes.
One year we had a freak Northern Californian migration (or arrival) of winged termites. The air was thick with them. You could wave a pan about in the air for a second and come up termite soup! Since their wings were gently falling off kitchen utensil regardless me thinks they were migrating FROM somewhere, I know not.
Seems possible. I imagine dragonflies can’t fly very far in a day, and there might be a few additional days spent eating before flying across the lake.
Well, that’s OK. How about I expand my question to “Which, if any, large non-aquatic animals with more than four legs migrate?” I don’t wanna go through the rest of my life not knowing if centipedes migrate or not, just because my question wasn’t sufficiently broad.
although ants can’t hope to cover the distances that a flying insect can but they have learned to do some migration. in the fall when weather gets cold (or used to get cold it’s going to be 85F today - dam polar tilt) they migrate into our houses.
