Bipolar dragonflies.

Last week I had shared a single photograph of the Wandering Glider, Pantala flavescens. Thought I might share some more today.

Maybe an entomologist or a dragonfly expert might be able to tell me better: but dragonflies appear to be quite bipolar, having two extreme states of behaviour. One is where they’re constantly flitting about, changing direction mid-air and never resting. A couple of times I have kept my eye on a single dragonfly and found that they can do that for over ten minutes. Maybe much more.

The other is where they become living statues, sometimes even non-responsive to light contact. I am not sure whether these are metabolic states of the dragonflies, age regimes, or something else entirely. So they’re either hyperactive or they are zombies. Coolio.

Dragonflies are quite colourful and pretty as they come, but I always found the lack of any substance at the back of their head a bit… disconcerting. [Flashback to the Temple of Doom, with chilled monkey brains for dessert. Yum.]

The Golden Dragon wanders.

Today’s offering is a golden dragonfly, called the Wandering Glider, Pantala flavescens. I may have tweaked the saturation a little, but believe you me, that was one richly coloured dragonfly. Turns out that it’s also considered the most widely distributed dragonfly in the world. Pity that it has so few good photos then. Tell me if I’m wrong, but the photo in this post is better than anything on the wiki page.

And even if I say so myself, I have better ones still up my sleeve. 🙂

Now all I need to do is follow this up with a picture of a silver stag and a copper star. And then we can all go Dance.

The Dragon’s Perch.

Top o’ the week to ya.

We closed last week with a damselfly here at TDC, so we open this week with a dragonfly. Orthetrum sabina is known by a variety of names such as the Slender Skimmer and the Green Marsh Hawk. A dapper sort of fellow, I spotted him in Coorg a couple of months ago.

Blue is a masculine colour.

Yesterday, I’d put up a picture of the female Ground Skimmer. Turns out that the male skimmer is of a completely different colour, a vivid blue instead of the mottled yellow.

Male spiders are tiny and usually get their heads eaten off. I guess male dragonflies have a slightly better deal.

Skimmer and Shimmer

Thought I’d relieve that spider overload with another dragonfly.

This is again on the beachside, adjacent to those Prosopis shrubs that I was talking about in the previous post. The beach was abuzz with dragonflies, and of many different varieties at that.

This is a female Indian Ground Skimmer, or the Diplacodes trivialis. A hat-tip to the Nerdy Birders for ID help, an excellent website on the birds, butterflies and dragonflies of India.

 

Black hawk down.

TDC presents the beautifully named Granite Ghost Dragonfly or Bradinopyga geminata. The mosaic pattern, especially in the thoracic region, is bewitching.

Speaking of ghosts, does anyone remember Space Ghost from the good old days of Cartoon Network?

Here there be dragons.

A dragonfly of unknown make. Fairly common in south India and perhaps the largest among the often-seen species. While it’s considered a nuisance indoors, it’s another harmless insect out in the open. Though they fly around like mad (and often apparently without aim,) they can stay still for hours on end. I am not sure if it’s just the way they sleep, or their pattern when they are in their dying days, but this behaviour of theirs make them excellent subjects of photography. This particular specimen stood (?) hanging on a plant just outside my front door for a few hours in the evening. Allowed me to setup a tripod and play with the lights and everything. Hours later, finding the damned fly in the exact same position, I truly thought it dead and used a stick to try and get it off the stem (to take it indoors and do some “studio” shots). It took umbrage and flew off, grumbling.