All the years that I have been in California, it was not until last weekend that I saw a red dragonfly. In fact, there were red dragonflies in abundance, around the lake at the South Coast Botanic Gardens. This is one of those infrequent occasions where I got an outstanding picture (Damsel is the queen of artistic photos in our family).
I did some research and found out that this is a Ruby Meadowhawk, a variety of the suborder Anistoptera (Dragonfly). This is an excerpt from the WikiPedia page on Dragonflies:
Dragonflies typically eat mosquitoes, midges and other small insects like flies, bees, and butterflies. They are usually found around lakes, ponds, streams, and wetlands because their larvae, known as “nymphs”, are aquatic. Dragonflies do not normally bite or sting humans (though they will bite in order to escape, for example, if grasped by the abdomen); in fact, they are valued as a predator that helps control the populations of harmful insects, such as mosquitoes. It is because of this that dragonflies are sometimes called “mosquito hawks.”