northeast-flora-and-fauna

After all my talk about blue dragonflies, you'll all be excited to know that today I'm talking about something much different: blue damselflies like this Blue-fronted Dancer . 😁 The 1st thing to look at when identifying these guys is to look at how they hold their wings. If the wings were held at the same height as the abdomen, we'd have to rule out a lot of bluets . But this damselfly is holding its wings completely above the abdomen, something you normally see only in dancers and sprites . seriously cutting down the number of damselflies you need to consider. The next most important thing to consider is that the thorax is almost completely blue, with only a small number of very thin black lines going from front to back. Relatively few damselflies look like that. Finally the front segments of the abdomen are almost entirely black, with only the last 3 being blue. That's generally considered to be the clincher for a Blue-fronted Dancer. Apparently it's much trick...

Here's a damselfly ("don't call us dragonflies ") I don't notice a lot, the Powdered Dancer . Though they have the title of "largest dancer in NJ", that's a lot like being the largest dogwood in the forest; there's a lot of trees (or odonates ) that are bigger. And their grayish ashy look actually camouflages pretty well against rocks. At first I thought I was taking a picture of only 1 of them, but if you look closely you'll see what looks like more eyes near the end of the abdomen. There's more to this story. July 26, 2022 at Washington Valley Park Photo 222063583, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) And when I got a slightly sideways view, it was clear that not only were there 2 Powdered Dancers there, but they were also mating. This is called a mating wheel, where the male (in front and ashy gray) clasps onto the head of the female with the end of his abdomen, and then the female (in the back and green/brown) uses her abd...