Paper wasp defeats dragonfly, feast follows

[rjlittlefield]

My wife called me to the garden to see this event in progress.

We have no idea who started the fight, but it ended badly for the dragonfly.

The photos are in natural order by time...

When I first arrived, the action seemed to be over already.




But no, a few seconds later there was furious thrashing.




After several inches of thrashing along the ground, things calmed down again. (This one and the earlier two photos are all timestamped 6:06 pm.)




By five minutes later, the dragonfly was no longer moving, and the paper wasp was taking off with the first load of thorax meat.




This was after the wasp's first load.




Two hours later, the wasp had stopped visiting and the ants had moved in.




Web search finds lots of reports of wasp/dragonfly conflicts, most apparently ending badly for the wasp.

These two species commonly inhabit my yard, but I have no idea whether fights are common. This is the first one that I've seen.

The photos are from cell phone, except for the last one. That's from DSLR with macro lens and flash, and it's a merge of two photos that showed ants in more interesting positions.

--Rik

[Sym P. le]

Impressive, if not disgusting! What to say?

[WojTek]

Hi Rik,
Very interesting story.
Probably the dragonfly was already weakened before the wasp appeared.
Best, ADi

[rjlittlefield]

Probably the dragonfly was already weakened before the wasp appeared.

That's definitely a possibility. We notice that even in the earliest photos the dragonfly's abdomen seems damaged around segment #2, a little behind the thorax. Perhaps that was caused by something like a bird strike, leading to a narrow escape that was followed by "out of the frying pan, into the fire".

--Rik

[MarkSturtevant]

Quite a find! Paper wasps and yellowjackets do a lot of hunting, but I've never heard about one bagging prey this big.

[rjlittlefield]

A couple of days after the event, I retrieved the remains of the dragonfly: a totally stripped exoskeleton with a well-rotted leaf skeleton stuck to it.

Here's what that pair looks like on my kitchen counter, crossed-eye stereo:




Shot handheld, using the two-shot cha-cha technique. Auto-aligned in StereoPhotoMaker, sharpened in Topaz AI.

--Rik