Beachgoers enjoying a summer day were horrified as a massive swarm of dragonflies invaded their paradise in a scene resembling the biblical plague.
Countless dragonflies unexpectedly filled the air at Misquamicut State Beach in Westerly, Rhode Island, on Saturday.
‘I was enjoying a nice day at Misquamicut State Beach until we endured a dragonfly apocalypse,’ Stephanie Martin, one sunbather who recorded the terrifying incident, told WCVB.
A video showed the dragonflies dominated the skies on the beach and over the shoreline, causing many beachgoers to scream and run.
‘God, this is… I have never seen anything like this in my life,’ a woman recording the weird episode could be heard saying.
‘I mean this is insane. Oh my god, it is unbelievable… It is… oh my god. Oh my god, this is…’
The crowd reacted in differed ways to the insects. A person could be seen using a body board to try to shield from the winged animals. As some ran, others could be seen sitting calmly on their beach towels, presumably waiting for the swarm to pass.
Another witness who recorded a video, Richard Sontag, told the TV station that it was a straight out ‘invasion’.
But another witness, Mark Stickney, 63, was amazed and ‘agog with the sheer number’ of the swarm.
‘One of those spectacles of nature that you very rarely get to see so I was all happy,’ he told The Boston Globe.
While scary to some, dragonflies do not harm humans. They travel in big groups and eat smaller insects including mosquitos.
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‘You can get anywhere from a dozen to millions or even billions of dragonflies flying together in these big groups,’ Christine Goforth, the head of citizen science at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, told WBUR in 2019.
Dragonfly swarms appear when they are migrating from southward every fall but have recently been congregating earlier in the year, according to Goforth.
Misquamicut State Beach is about 40 miles west of Newport along the coast.
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