Damselfly Love is Heart-Shaped and Bubbly
by Byron Varvarigos
Title
Damselfly Love is Heart-Shaped and Bubbly
Artist
Byron Varvarigos
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
OK, I'm hoping to provide you with a bit of entertaining info, as a way of coping with my boredom, waiting for the storms to pass so I can get down to the pond and maybe photograph lotuses. This is a highly cropped photo I took yesterday, at a small stream, from a distance of about 8 ft, of blue damselflies mating. Blue is rather a misnomer, since the females are sometimes golden brown. You can see the heart shape; the bubbles are a camera artifact. At this point I'd like to refer you to a wonderful short BBC video on Youtube, "The Blue Damselfly", which goes into all sorts of info about these beautiful little wonders, including their amazingly complex mating behavior. To mate, the male must first establish a territory by fighting off other males. Then, if a female enters the territory, he must impress her by showing off his wings. If she shows interest she'll point her abdomen slightly downwards, and then the male grasps her thorax with special appendages at the tip of his abdomen. If the female senses a good fit, she'll extend her abdomen to the male's thorax, at which point copulation begins. Begins with the male scouring out her receptacle to remove any sperm previously deposited by another male, before depositing his own. Then the male flies down to the stream to show the female good spots for laying her eggs, normally on floating vegetation. Of course, as in humans, there are several points where the male may be unceremoniously rejected. : )
Uploaded
July 12th, 2013
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