This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Monarch butterflies are famous for their long haul to Mexico, a migration of more than 2,500 miles.

But far more impressive is a species of dragonfly,

pantala flavescens.

It's commonly known as a globe skimmer,

and it lives up to its name, migrating between 9 and 11,000 miles.

Being really good at gliding, being able to take advantage of winds, being able to track rainy seasons, having short developmental times, because the larvae can develop very, very quickly.

All those factors, according to Rutgers Evolutionary Biologist Jessica Ware,

suggests that dragonflies may actually be one huge global population of interbreeding

insects.

To test that idea, Ware and her colleagues sequenced DNA from Dragonflies, collected

in Guyana, Japan, Korea, India, Canada, and the US.

And since the genes they'd sequence tend to mutate very quickly, if the populations were

not interbreeding, you'd expect to see differences from region to region.

Instead, they found dragonflies in Japan that were more closely related to ones from

Giana than their own Japanese cousins.

And that pattern of cross-continental similarities held true around the world.

This is a really compelling story that this is a species of the entire planet of the Earth.

It's not regional. The region is the planet.

The results appear in the journal Plus 1. As a truly global species though, how will

it react to global change?

If anything, climate change might just affect, you know, where it's able to set up these other

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