The Original (Erroneous) Post and Observation:
?This morning I was moving plants out onto the patio, and saw what I thought was the body of a dragonfly laying there. I picked it up, thinking to set it aside and examine the remains later, try to identify the species. It looked to me like something had bitten the head off. I had it by the folded wings, and the legs started kicking. This creeped me out a little, and had me wondering how the body could keep moving without the head. I took it upstairs and set it in a container. A couple hours later I came indoors for something, looked at it again, poked at it with my finger. Legs started moving again. Surely it couldn't live that long without a head. So I grabbed it by the wings and peered at it closely. I realized that it wasn't headless, it had a shrunken deformed head, really bizarre looking. What really puzzles me is how the heck the thing managed to live out its larval stage with a shrunken head. The snapper swing-arm jaw must have been working. The mandibles on this adult are pretty much useless, it is doomed to starve to death. It's already weak, or it probably would have flown away while I was photographing it out in the bright sunlight.
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