Ja. Nymphs. There's a smaller version of dragonfly. A damselfly. Just the names seemed beautiful. Flying damsel. Anyway, I ended up watching this guy for nine hours. At first, on and off, as he appeared to just be swimming around, trying to make up his mind as to where exactly he (or was it she?) wanted to get out of the water, because from the dry empty shells I'd guessed they do their trans- formation on dry land. Then, when it appeared that it was getting serious about getting outta the water, I watched it non-stop. I told it; "o.k., you little fucker. Better do this right, cuz I wanna take photographs of how you emerge from this stage.". And as I watched, I began to realize that what I'm seeing is a pretty amazing transformation from a kind of an ugly, flat fat water bug into a flying insect that maneuvers through the air with much better ability that any technologically advanced helicopter. Actually, a fly flies way more gracefully than
any flying machine. Only I had no idea how this change from water bug to flying expert came about. So, I did the only thing I could. I watched.
Of course, the first change was that it went from being an underwater breathing bug to one that was able to breathe air. The six legs it had and used for swimming suddenly became land walking appendages. This one, in his swimming around, had somehow managed to break off half of his middle leg on the right side. It'd stop, still in the water, and I could tell it was getting tired, tired and frantic almost, it seemed to me, as if it knew that it didn't have much time left to do its thing.
It was getting on in the afternoon, and it was acting as if it was terribly important to do this. As if whatever change was happening already within it was pushing it to go faster. This inner change became apparent hours later, and at this point I couldn't even guess how incredible it would be to see what this critter showed me. But, as it stopped to rest for a while, I could see it moving its stump of the broken-off leg, and I thought, poor baby, it must hurt, huh? And it'd sit there, still as can be, except for the stump waving in the water. Finally, after a very long time, it managed to get out of the water. The surface of the satellite dish too smooth for it to get any traction, and it'd fall back time after time