Part 9

After it has shed its skin the dragon fly continues to grow. It keeps on growing until it has outgrown its new skin.

Then what do you think it does?

Yes, Charlie, that is right, it sheds this skin too.

When it sheds its skin we say it moults.

It moults several times, and at last little short wings appear. At first it has no wings at all, you know.

Amy wonders how the larva breathes under water.

Ah, Master Ned, you are laughing too soon. You think insects do not have to breathe, but you are very much mistaken, sir.

Insects do have to breathe.

They would die if they could get no air to breathe.

Some of the dragon fly larvae have an odd arrangement for breathing under water. They have a sort of syringe in the end of the body, and there are breathing pores or gills in the syringe.

The water goes in and out of this syringe, and the larva breathes as the fish does, by means of its gills.

Yes, May, its gills are in its syringe, which seems very odd,--you see the dragon fly larva breathes at its tail end instead of at its head end.

Mollie thinks it is an upside-down, inside-out sort of a creature anyway. But it knows what it is about.

Ned wants to know how it can get any air to breathe when it lives under water.

The truth is, there is always air mixed in with water, and it is this air the larva breathes when the water goes in and out of the syringe.

It uses the syringe for another purpose too. When it pleases it can shoot out the water with great force, and thus propel itself quite a distance.

By means of the syringe it can leap through the water faster than it can move by its slow-going legs.

Mollie wants to know if we can see the syringe.

No, it is inside the body.

But there is a kind of dragon fly that has a pair of gills outside, at the end of the abdomen, instead of the syringe inside.

The best I can do is to show you a picture of one. Some day we may find it in the pond.

Those two feather-like parts at the tail end are gills.

Yes, John, it can propel itself through the water by rowing, as it were, with these gills.

There are some species of dragon fly larvae that swim by moving the tip of the abdomen from side to side, as a fish moves its body when it swims.

But now let us return to our funny larva that lives at the bottom of the pond. It stays down there, eating and growing and moulting, for nine or ten months or even longer; then something very wonderful happens.

It suddenly feels a great desire to get up to the top of the pond.

It climbs up a weed or a stick until it is clear out of the water.

Then its skin splits down the back for the last time, and out there pulls itself, not a larva, but a weak-looking dragon fly, with soft and flabby little wings.