Dragonflies are very ancient insects; they already flew around when the dinosaurs ruled this world. The dinosaurs disappeared, but the dragonflies remained. Today we have about 5000 species of dragonflies all over the world. .

Dragonflies, those wonderful insects, colorful as the rainbow they fly just above the water surface, looking like some kind of helicopters. And like milliary helicopters they patrol their territory, as soon as another dragonfly is brave enough to enter the territory, a amazing air-battle begins. The more I study these fantastic insects the more interested and amazed I become.

This site was founded 1996 as there was no Swedish dragonfly site on the net. This site is created and maintained by Martin Peterson. I am not a professional odonatologist: dragonflies are just a hobby for me. I got interested in dragonflies in 1992 The site started up in small scale, but have been expanded as soon as I have got ideas and time to write HTML-code. As it is getting harder and harder to find new ideas I welcome all kind of feedback from you who visits this site. What do you think is missing at this site? Please drop me a mail and tell me.

There are about 5000 dragonflies around the world, 61 of those are found in Sweden . This makes dragonflies nice to study, there is (almost) no problem at all to separate those species in the nature, most of them are possibly to separate with the naked eye. A few of them (mostly damselflies) need to be cougth to separate. Catching is a problem as the dragonflies are such good aviators, someone called dragonfly catching entomological fly-fishing. As dragonflies are the largest insects they are quite easy to take photos of and photography is a good method of collecting dragonflies without killing them. Dragonflies are just too beautifully to be killed by entomologist. Despite their beauty many dragonflies are threatened, pollution and reclaiming of lakes and swamps is fatal for the dragonflies. This far the Swedish environment is, compared with many other countries, quite undisturbed thus I think Sweden is a really dragonfly paradise.

Page updated June 20 2008
	Copyright © 2004-2008 Martin Peterson