Each year, millions of dragonflies arrive on the Maldive Islands, but until now no one has known where they came from.
Now they do.
It appears, says Biologist Charles Anderson, writing in The Journal of Tropical Ecology, that the insects are blown to the chain of islands, lying 500 to 1,000 km from the mainland of southern India, by monsoon winds coming from Africa as part of the world's longest insect migration between East Africa and India.
The total round-trip distance is 14,000 to 18,000 km, or about twice as far as the migration of monarch butterflies between Mexico and Southern Canada.
Over 98% of the dragonflies that show up in the Maldives are the aptly named species known as "Globe Skimmers" (Pantala flavescens).
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