I appear to have run out of Sunday in which to write about bugs. No matter, I think I have a photo that’ll more than make up for a lack of words on my part.
Face to to face with one of the orange dragonflies that spent their days zooming over (and, in this case, falling into) the swimming pool at our house in Vanuatu.
and the close up
That’s all from me today (I have to get back to writing about statistics and land snail gut contents, which is actually surprisingly interesting),if you’re a fan of these beautiful bugs theres a couple of posts about dragonfly’s closest cousins the damselflies here.
This week’s Sunday Spinelessness is dedicated to those people who wash up at this post after googling for “Austrolestes colensonis” only to be disappointed. At the time I wrote that post on our damselflies I didn’t have a photo of the the New Zealand Blue Damselfly, let me correct that now. A full body shot:
And a close up:
These photos were taken at Fensham Reserve in the Wairarapa. We walked through the bush there on a bright summer’s afternoon and every time we passed a break in the canopy we found a little flight of Austrolestes basking in the sun. The reflective wings were beautiful, but, as you’re about to see, not easily photographed:
It’s been a bit of a wintry Sunday here in Dunedin so I’ll dedicate today’s round of Sunday Spinelessness to a group of insects we should see a lot more of as summer takes hold, the Damselflies (Odonata:Zygoptera).
That’s Xanthocnemis zealandica which is sometimes called the “common redcoat damselfly.” It’s certainly common enough, visit a pond or wetland in summer and you’ll see hundreds of them skimming across the water to lay their eggs or perched on blades of grass or on trees (despite having an insect’s full compliment of six legs those limbs are purely for perching – odonates can’t walk).
You can probably tell just by looking at Xanthocnemis that damselflies are related to dragonflies, in fact the damsels and the dragons are two infra-orders in the medievaly themed order Odonata . You can tell a damselfly from a dragonfly thanks to the way they hold their wings – damselflies fold them up over their body when they land while dragonflies hold them open (kiwi naturalist Shelia Natusch describes this posture in a slightly morbid way: “wings extended, as though already pinned down on a collector’s board”) .
Damselflies are expert hunters – adults take small insects on the wing and their nymphs are pretty impressive aquatic predators – some will even take small fish. I don’t know that any of the New Zealand species are quite as aggressive as all that but you can see photos of the nymphs thanks to
Landcare Research and
Waitakere City Council’s website (which includes a ‘profile’ written in the first person).
There are six species of damselfly described in New Zealand – three more Xanthocnemis species (each of which are rare and restricted to a small area) , Austrolestes colensonis (which is blue and almost as comon as X. zealandica) and the self-introduced Ischnura aurora. Despite the lack of a red coat the next picture is likely another X. zealandica (it certainly isn’t Austrolestes or Ischnura and as far as I can tel the other Xanthocnemis species aren’t known from Dunedin.)
