This spring was our intended destination on yesterday's adventure. We arrived thirsty. The source in the little cave above the waterfall looked like the emerging water must have been filtered by the mountain above. Very tempting. However, having experienced giardia once before, I decided we should not indulge. Our goal was to see if our friend the Hellgrammite was still under the rock at the base of the fall. He wasn't. But another, probably a relative, was.
This is such a fascinating creature. The nymph of the Dobsonfly, it spends the majority of its life in larval/nymphal stages, and only a small portion as an adult. Imagine if in a 75-year human lifespan, we decided the "age of majority" would be 70. Think of the legal and social implications. It's sort of a moot experiment, of course, because all reproduction and child rearing would be done my minors. That is, if such were even legal. And Dobsonflies are not even the most extreme example of this disparity between youthful life and adulthood. There are many insects whose adult life is a day or less. Food for thought.
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