Tutubi
When the moment is right, a dragonfly nymph leaves the nourishing calm waters of its maturation, locates a sturdy stem, affixes itself for stability, and begins its final metamorphosis, cracking open it’s outer skin and rising from the shell of the exuvia, an event in the life course called an emergence.
Dragonflies emerged into my worldview through a series of movements within the past few weeks, appearing as illness omens made visible through the patterns of their biodiversity in an environment, their reproduction, and mobilities mapped and charted from as far as outer space and as close as the neural level. Dragonflies are mediums, indicators, and modulators of environments that offer human eyes a way of knowing something of the invisible ecological infrastructures always present. I had never given much thought to dragonflies, having lived my life in cities, urban freshwater sources are sparse for Odonates, dragonflies, and mayflies, to breed and grow. Seeing a dragonfly was a rare occurrence, something that took place outside of normal daily life. Of course, I knew of dragonflies, but their mere existence is not knowing anything about them. And then suddenly, there they were, swarming my twitter feed with mass migratory movements observable by satellites in space, appearing in lectures, in stories, and in the news, aggressively claiming space in my field of vision. What is it that they want me to know?
It is a peculiar thing, coming to know a non-human organism through the virtual information ecosystem. Learning remotely through a screen is currently the only possible way to learn as human society is deeply in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and anyway, it is April, and spring is not the right season for dragonflies in the Pacific Northwest. Odonates prefer the warm days and cool nights of late summer. So I follow the lead of the emergences as they appear to me, and journey at a distance to see where we go and what these winged earth critters would like me to know.
Reading the myths and legends of old Bicol, the southern part of Luzon island in the Philippines, dragonflies– or in Tagalog– tutubi, are resilient characters standing against injustice. In the tale, “Tutubi and the Monkey King”, the Tutubi defeat the monkey army who would not extend the basic kindness of allowing rest to the weak and vulnerable in the sinewy branches of the primordial Bayan tree, by sitting on their foreheads so the monkeys would beat themselves to death. In another story, Tutubi is sent on a mission to locate a lost comrade in the woods. He sets out wearing his best formal wear, a bowtie, but along his journey, he has a series of interactions where he is laughed at or entirely dismissed, causing him to reflect, and become increasingly self-conscious of his appearance. Tutubi re-ties the bow-tie around his neck, over and over, tighter and tighter, until he is accidentally decapitated. And in another story, titled, “Tutubi, tutubi, wag kang magpahuli sa batang mapanghi!”, which narrowly translates into English as “ Dragonfly, Dragonfly, do not give in to the barbarians”, Tutubi’s wings are plucked from his back by a thoughtless giant who wanted to keep him as a pet. Tutubi slowly wastes away, having his most vital asset taken by force, the freedom to fly in life. In this last story, Tutubi’s loss embodies the greatest injustice possible, the continuous oppression of life by force on the whims of the powerful, and as a metaphor, this story has been used to represent the Filipino experience during Marital Law, a brutal historical period marked by the totalitarian regime of President Marcos from 1971- 1983.
Tutubi’s journey for justice against power, self-discovery, and resilience under oppression, an underdog able to overcome illusions of self and emerge as a true form; powerful, and poetic. The archetype of the dragonfly in Philippine mythology is that by accepting change and learning to let go, true freedom can be obtained.
The wisdom of tutubi continues from myth into the ecology of the Philippines archipelago, a biodiversity hotspot for Odonata. In the dense humid rainforests, rice patties, and the freshwater streams that meanderously curl around the base of mountains, more than 1076 species of dragonflies thrive in microhabitats, the majority of which are endemic to the Philippines. Of the most common presences, the land-loving, sky hunting “hawkers” and “darners” of Aeshnidae and Chlorogomphidae are common in the Philippines, as are the water hunters, the “skimmer” or “cruisers” of the Cordullidae, Gomphidae, Libellulidae, and Macromiidae families.
In the Philippine archipelago, the morphology of specific Odonates changes based on the microhabitat of each island, and there are 7,641 islands contained within the boundaries of the nation-state. Tutubi are highly sensitive to their environment. As they move through development phases, called instars, from Nymph to final metamorphosis, they shed their skin and emerge anew. With each instar, tutubi’s body subtly changes, reacting to factors in the environment. If the freshwaters of the nymph’s birth and growth contain certain pollutants or high concentrations of heavy metals, the tutubi will carry these presences through subtle alterations in their appearance. If the toxins are significant, some species of tutubi will no longer breed near affected water sources.
Tutubi are environmental health indicators.
I learned this from a presentation at the Pina/o/xy Powerpoint Party, a virtual event during the quarantine for Filipinx scholars and allies to build a scholarly network. The presentation was given by Stephanie Bondocgawa Maflamills, a Filipina-Peruvian entomologist, and Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University researching the changing appearance of dragonflies between islands, their genetic dispersal patterns, and the mobilities across the archipelago. During Maflamills’s field research tracing endemic sub-species between the smaller, lesser-studied islands, she found that learning about tutubi, required the expertise of the people in the local barangay– or neighbor unit. Communities in the Philippines pay careful attention to the variations of tutubi around them, attuning and noticing the hyper details, length of thorax and antenna, the partitioning of veins and differentiated polygonal shapes that make-up personalized geometries along the wings of Odonata, and the vibrancy or muted hues of exterior color patterns marking exoskeletons. As freshwater quality becomes increasingly scarce during climate crisis, the maps of tutubi migrations are tracking with human ones- whole communities are moving to sites where freshwater is accessible, increasing into the peripheries of urban sprawl, where sewer and water infrastructure holds the promise of greater stability. In her study, Maflamills is recording this knowledge as a symbiotic pattern, people know water quality through tutubi. Tutubi’s mobilities signal humans to disperse. Human mobilities manifest infrastructures where dragonflies can successfully breed.
Tutubi model resilience.
As part of Maflamill's dissertation work, she is developing an illustrated field guide for the communities who helped her learn to see morphology, to help disperse the knowledge endemic to the archipelago across the islands. Maflamills’ research illustrates how tutubi are mobilizing humans in dragonfly dispersal patterns, which draws the attention of scientists and environmental activists, who attune to sites of pollution from agriculture, industrial factories or mining operations, and begin to apply pressure to the systems involved, such as state regulatory commissions. The politics that are illuminated by following the dispersal pathways and morphology of Tutubi are central in Maflamills research practices in other ways as well, specifically in creating a de-colonial citational chain. During the literature review phase of preparation to do a Ph.D., Maflamills noticed a theme in the literature. The authors, and often the language used when publishing studies of Philippine Odonata were either German or Dutch. She also noticed that the Filipino field guides who helped the European entomologists locate and differentiate sub-species within dragonfly families were never named. Maflamills is part of the first Philippine dragonfly program staffed with a team of Filipinx field collaborators and biologists whose work and knowledge will be clearly attributed in future publications.
Tutubi stand against injustice.
Listening to the stories of Stephanie Bondocgawa Maflamills adventures in learning how to know, to see, and to map tutubi mobilities through the lens of human communities, I too wanted to know the lessons of tutubi through their observable messages. Googling for images of tutubi and attempting to find examples of changing morphology between islands, two citizen-science initiatives surfaced in the search results. “INaturalist” where 22 people in the Philippines have collectively submitted 173 photographed sightings of 36 species, and “Project Noah” where 43 peoples have submitted 156 images from across the archipelago. My favorite submission was on Project Noah; a portrait of a Straight-edged Red Parasol dragonfly (Neurothemis terminata), one of the common inhabitants belonging to the Libellulidae family. Submitted by the observer with the user name, “KdonGalay”, from a trendy neighborhood area in Manilla, alongside a branch of the Paranaque river, the photos came in a series of three.
The first photo features a close up of tutubi’s head, taken from above, looking down. The viewer sees the creature’s exquisite compound eyes. Thousands of rich blood-red lenses, that receive light-based information from all angles, shuffling it along the sensory cell (retina), that transforms the data to a form understandable by tutubi’s interneurons, makes vision a spherical experience. The compound eyes shine, reflecting in the photograph as if they were made of the finest blown glass. At the base of tutubi’s head, thin bristle-like hairs caress the occipital cavity at the base of the neck. And from the forward section of tutubi’s head, two short black antennas reach outward with a gentle curvature. Through antennae, tutubi taste air, perceive their own speed or that of movement near them, smell with location-driven precision, and experience temporal space with depth and acuity requiring several thousand photosensitive receptors and an embodied knowledge of time-space.
The second photo centers the wing, a mosaiced network of interconnecting lines and colors: otonomal shades, earthen tones, with flares of fiery zeal. The wings are built with fine masonry to be as lite as air yet impenetrably strong against the onslaught of weather or materia encountered in flight. The wings are controlled by a set of muscles in the thorax of tutubi’s body, a complex internal web of fibers woven in patterns that react in perfect choreography to the information perceived by the sensory organs. The tips of the wings are curiously translucent as if dipped in bleach, disguising their wingspan, presenting it as deceptively shorter than it truly is. The wings are fractals, I see their cellular divisions in the dermis of my own hand, their elegant slopes in the seed-pods of the maple tree, and their godly-unstraightened lines in the romance and mystery of stained glass windows; offering a view of the interplay between imagined realms of natural and cultural.
In the final photo, the whole of tutubi is shown, from reflective globed eyes to the articulated erect tail. Tutubi is streamlined. Wings held in a respectful bow. At rest but also ready. To lift off tutubi must only pull the tail down with a force that would send the thorax upward in reaction, a mere abdominal contraction away from taking flight and reaching possible speeds of 60 mph (97 km/h). This tiny, beautiful creature seems to defy expectations. Tutubi is a contradiction: flexible yet with amplified tensile strength, rigid yet agile through articulated segments that guide movement at extreme speeds, a reticulated organism, part of a network of water, air, and land, cohabitating in dense urban spaces, found resting on the metal wiring of human-made fencing.
While this submission was mesmerizing, the other submissions were also deeply captivating. On the screen, tutubi dance, at rest on sticks, stems, leaves, rocks, on blades of grass, or in movement, in the air, diving into the water for a snack or to discreetly dip and leave their eggs. Tutubi have also been captured engaged in the intimate act of reproduction, a movement requiring impressive and enviable bodily contortions. What strikes me as I peruse the many images submitted, is my lack of an eye for difference and how specialized this ability to notice subtle changes in tutubi is. Perhaps I am too mesmerized to see, or perhaps the practice takes a lifetime, or more, to attune. The citizen-scientists who post images with location and chat below each image help point me to this way of seeing. And I am reminded of tutubi’s journey to find the comrade lost in the woods. Tutubi, desperate to be seen and recognized for the beauty and value within, tightens a bowtie, the imperial formal wear recognized as worthy of respect until tutubi’s head is dislodged. Citizen-science, as a participatory model, seeks to know tutubi as they are, where they are, through intimate, and perhaps generational knowledge, opening pathways for epistemic mobility that are head-less. Participatory science, as a headless sovereign, makes space for tutubi to shed the imperial bow-tie of odonatology’s past, and mobilize the lost comrades in the woods to tell a different story.
Tutubi willfully innovate.
In the news, headlines read, “Nature’s Drone, Pretty and Deadly”, and “Dragonfly brains could make missile defenses faster and more accurate”. In these stories, the attributes of the dragonfly’s body, the incredible speed and strength, the compound eyes and sensory perceptions able to calculate not only their own movements through time-space but everything in their surroundings makes the dragonfly an “apex predator” in the insect world. The news articles suggest dragonflies catch their prey with 95% accuracy, eating primarily other waterborne insects, mosquitoes, and flies, however, an odd frog, hummingbird, or even a fish is not an unknown phenomenon. The typical hunt is characterized by dragonflies capturing their prey in mid-flight while passing by, unaware of the perched sentinel waiting for a snack. dragonflies are described as fierce predators that consume around 100 mosquitoes per day, making them a favorite of gardeners, who intentionally entice dragonflies by planting specific flora.
Like gardeners, the exceptional hunting performance of the dragonfly also caught the attention of the US military. A group at Sandia Research Labs, is mapping the neural network of the dragonfly to create an algorithmic model of dragonfly sensory processing, aimed at understanding how dragonflies maneuver to intercept their prey. The algorithmic model is being designed to improve missile defense systems that rely on artificial intelligence programs to strategize maneuvers used to intercept targets. The method for learning how dragonflies function as “killing machines”, relies on invasive neurological techniques. Dragonflies are placed in a vice with electrodes attached to their head. The electrodes measure the pulses fired by the neurons in reaction to visual stimuli to map how dragonflies establish “fixation” on a specific “target”.
In another story, engineers in the DragonflEye project at Draper Labs in Massachusetts, designed a tiny backpack that hacks into the dragonflies “steering neurons” by sending signals directly into their body through their optic nerve, a tactic that first required the bioengineering of dragonfly DNA, making them extra light sensitive to ensure their flight movements could be manipulated using light pulses. The backpacks are solar powered and remotely controlled, a veritable guidance system letting scientists inform dragonflies movements from a far. Remote navigation design is an old hat at Draper Labs, the company whose engineers designed the system that landed Apollo 11 on the moon. The intention behind this research is to create an “open platform” for new knowledge products. Possible applications for deploying micro-drone dragonflies include the systematic pollination of crops on industrial farms and search and rescue missions, a “new kind of micro-aerial vehicle” tout the researchers. Ironically, as the dragonfly disappears from the story, the “other applications” imagined for this technology are told. The monitoring of climate change and the collection of relevant data is believed to be an output of this new micro-drone tool, to “help guide policies to protect fragile ecosystems.” describes one of the project’s engineers. And so, once again, Tutubi has been caught by the barbarians and must suffer the injustice of living oppressed at the whims of the powerful unable to see what was always, already there.
Tutubi’s wisdom is in the eye of the beholder.
The story of Tutubi is ongoing and highly dependent on who is doing the telling. To those who listen, Tutubi warns of harmful waters and mobilizes the movement of communities– human and non-human– to healthier environments. To those willing to see, Tutubi shows how the knowledge of those attuned to the patterns and changes around them liberates the scientific model. Yet, Tutubi’s trials and tribulations are not over. Imperial eyes dismiss Tutubi, and the bowtie tightens. Greedy propertarians abuse Tutubi, and in the process, ensure their own self-destruction.
There are histories being made that involve invisible material stuff: imperial scientific prestige, imaginaries of human exceptionalism, industrial and venture capital, and the technological embrace of a promised future. Within, between, and alongside these histories, dragonflies are a storytelling technology for humans to know the state of ecosystems, humans are telling stories about dragonflies, technologies are elevating dragonfly stories and their tellers and through dragonflies, humans are learning to tell better stories about the shared world.
Tutubi’s wisdom offers humans ways to see themselves and their world, the microwork of coming to an understanding of the dynamics at play. Between the dragonfly, its materialities, and what is actually happening is a set of deeply complex transformations–instars– for Tutubi, for human communities, for ecologies and planetary environments; a series of little interventions, the letting go of illusions, the liberation of knowledge, and acceptance of change, leading to the emergence of what comes next.
