'It Happens Every Year Almost the Same'

When we think of ferocious predators among animals we likely think of sharks and grizzly bears, big creatures with teeth. But I remember as a kid watching ladybugs on a rose bush moving through aphids like a combine through wheat. They can consume thousands in their brief life span. Another small and notably efficient hunter is the order Odonata – dragonflies and damselflies. I spent a day in an upstate New York marsh with a neuroethologist, a biologist who studies how an animal’s nervous system determines its behavior. Odonata was his specialty. His research showed their kill rate for insects, most often mosquitoes, topped ninety-seven percent. Eighty percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to vision, and their field of vision is 360 degrees. Like ladybugs they are harmless to humans. I remembered that day when reading the Louisiana poet David Middleton’s “August into Autumn” (Time Will Tell: Collected Poems (Texas Review Press, 2025): “It happens every year almost the same And…