BYU Animation Wins Student Emmy Award
Can a baby kraken become a pirate? Ethan Briscoe and Tyler Bitner led a group of over 20 students in creating an animation telling this entertaining story.
BYU Students Tracking 6,300 Dragonfly Species
By Christie Allen
March 2023
To catch a dragonfly in a net, the best strategy is to approach from below and move swiftly, according to BYU biology graduate student Natalie Saxton.
“You kind of just have to swing as fast as you can,” she said. That’s because dragonflies’ enormous eyes offer a 300-degree view of the world, and the insects are the original and probably best fliers on the planet, with wings capable of such precise movement that engineers have studied them to improve drone flight.
Saxton is part of a team of BYU biologists that has been tracking down this fascinating insect around the world, from Vietnam to the islands of Vanuatu. Their goal is to piece together the first-ever phylogenic (genealogical) tree of all 6,300 known dragonfly species and their ancestors.
Related Videos
NASA’s Artemis I Launched, and BYU Heard It
How loud was the world’s most powerful rocket as it blasted off from NASA? A team of BYU Accoustics students and professors waited weeks to record and study its impact.
Studying the Runoff Effects of an Environmental Double Whammy
Video: In October 2018, BYU students had the rare chance to observe how back-to-back extreme events influenced water quality and quantity in Utah County.