Those of you who grew up in India, do you remember in your childhood, dragonflies, swarms of dragonflies? Maybe at school, maybe tying little bits of string onto them?

The Dragonfly represents the Japanese island, because of its form.

Charles Anderson discovers dragonflies that cross oceans

If you're going to study dragonflies, you want to study those really bright beautiful ones, like that red one. Or the really rare ones, the endemic endangered ones.

They have been used in traditional medicine in Japan and China.

Dragonfly is a popular symbol in japan and we often use it in arts, poems and in literature.

Images of dragonflies are common in Art Nouveau, especially in jewellery designs.

As a seasonal symbol in Japan, the dragonfly is associated with autumn.

The Dragonfly represents the inner world of the child, that it wants to be free in the nature, but it can't.

Now, the particular species of dragonfly I want to talk about is this one, because most dragonflies, like the one we've just seen, when the adult is there for its brief one or two months of life, it doesn't go very far. It can't travel very far.

I'm interested in all sorts of things, almost everything that moves, including dragonflies. And I'm actually going to talk, this afternoon, about dragonflies.

More generally, dragonflies are symbols of courage, strength, and happiness, and they often appear in art and literature, especially haiku.

Japanese children catch large dragonflies as a game, using a hair with a small pebble tied to each end, which they throw into the air.

The American supply consisted of Lockheed F 80, Lockheed T 33, Beech T 34 Mentor, Cessna T 37, Cessna A 37 Dragonfly and Northrop F 5E F for example, whereas the British supplied Hawker Hunters and the French delivered various helicopters and Dassault Mirage 50 aircraft.