Our American culture is rich with folklore and regional language for all kinds of animals, including insects. Take the dragonfly for example. You may know it by some other name.
Devil’s Darning Needle
Our European immigrant ancestors brought with them many superstitions, among them being a belief in the sinister qualities of dragonflies. Indeed, dragonflies were often associated with the Devil himself. The slender bodies of dragonflies suggested a darning needle back in the Middle Ages in Europe.
More recently, in Kansas, folklore has it that a “devil’s darning needle” will sew together the lips of foul-mouthed men, critical women, and naughty children. Meanwhile, in Iowa, they will sew together the fingers or toes of anyone who falls asleep.
Snake Doctor
Folks in the central and southeastern U.S. may refer to a dragonfly as a “snake doctor.” This seems to have at least a couple of origins. One is that dragonflies carry with them in their “saddlebags” (paired bumps on their “shoulders”) medicine that can cure snake bites.
Alternatively, dragonflies feed on the gnats and other flies that pester sunning snakes in bottomland swamps.
Horse Stinger
It is still widely believed by many that dragonflies can sting people and livestock. “Horse stinger” is what some in Nebraska call them, fueled by the belief that the insects even suck the blood of equines. More likely they are eating horse flies.
Male dragonflies do have some wicked-looking projections on the end of their abdomen, but those “claspers” are used to grab the female dragonfly around her neck during mating.
Female dragonflies possess a dagger-like ovipositor, but as the name of that organ suggests, she uses it to lay her eggs in aquatic vegetation, or mud or muck, or floating logs.
Devil’s Riding Horse
There’s that devil thing again. This dragonfly name seems peculiar to North Carolina, but “devil horse” and “devil’s horse” seem popular in Wisconsin, Alabama, and Mississippi. In Tennessee it is “devil’s dragon.”
Whatever You Call a Dragonfly…
Dragonflies are among our most spectacularly beautiful, and harmless, insects.
They earn their keep eating mosquitoes in both the adult and larval stages. Dragonflies spend their youth as voracious underwater predators in ponds, bogs, lakes, streams, and rivers; then they emerge as winged adults to delight us as “mosquito hawks” (there’s another name!) that eat bloodthirsty biting flies. Maybe it is time to retire all those intimidating names?