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Photo#70449
Celithemis eponina - male

Celithemis eponina - Male
Icehouse Pond, Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA
July 26, 2004
Any help is greatly appreciated! Also guidance towards a good Dragonfly and Damselfly Field Guide would be wonderful!

Pennant
This is one of the pennants, and from what I can see it looks like the Halloween Pennant.

Normally I would recommend as a first book Beginner's Guide to Dragonflies, by Blair Nikula and Jackie Sones. Since you are from MA, though, it probably makes more sense that get a book that has all the MA species: Nikula's Dragonflies and Damselflies of Massachusetts.

 
Thank you again!
Thank you, I was leaning towards that species, but the coloring seems so different, at least from the photos on this site. The others seem to have more translucent wings with darker bands that had more brown to them. Could this difference simply be due to age? We did learn how Hummingbird Moths (Hemaris Thysbe) shed the color in their wings over time and of course we know that most wings fade.. but it seems like a very big difference in coloring.

I am going to rush out for that guide! I really want to hone in on the exact species whenever we can and a local guide would be very helpful! You'd think that our Audubon stores would have them, but Dragonflies and Damselflies seem to not have as much demand?

 
If you decide to put this in the guide
don't submit another image. Just click on TAG and then go to the guide page where you want to place it. This is definitely Celithemis eponina. There is nothing else that looks like it!

 
Thank you!
OOh wonderful tip! I did add one of the others but couldn't see how to just "move" it! Now I'll move them all! I definitely want to add this one since it brings in a much richer color than the other photos that are currently posted!

Really I can't thank you all enough, my son is going to be so thrilled that we now have names for these beauties!

We went ponding at one of the local Audubon sanctuaries earlier this summer and our family found 2 dragonfly nymphs including one HUGE one that they brought indoors to their tank. I think we could have picked our guide's brains for hours, if not days or months... he had gorgeous entomoly panels filled with specimens that he'd collected all during college and had so much to share, but there were a dozen other children who wanted to just get all the larger swimming critters and get to play with them instead of digging in the muck and learning like we did!


More Photos from Creepy Crawlies Day

 
Dragonfly wings
Dragonflies, from what I have seen, seem to be the opposite of butterflies in that their wings get more colorful with age. Butterflies and moths have scales on their wings which give them color and pattern. These naturally rub off with use, making the wings duller. Dragonflies do not have scales, so any color and pattern on the wings is developed within the wing itself. A freshly emerged (teneral) dragon typically will have very soft, shiny, and mostly colorless wings. Dragons that have wing patterns, like pennants, at this stage will typically have the pattern very very faintly, like a Polaroid that has just been taken. Over the next couple days, as the wings harden, the pattern will darken and take on more and more color. The color change in pennants is usually more drastic in males, and I think this is especially true in Halloween Pennants. Females typically will get up to a nice golden yellow color with dark brown bands, but males can get very dark orange-red with red veining on the brown bands.

Interestingly, the body colors on most dragons work the other way: most intense right after emerging and duller and duller as they get older. Body color can also be affected by temperature, especially in Darners. If you catch an Aeshna darner on a hot day and cool it off in the fridge for a few hours to take its picture more easily, the bright blue spots on the abdomen will often dull down to more of a brownish or deep lavender color.

Dragonflies are so awesome and fascinating, I can't believe there aren't more people into them. Tell your Audubon store to get with the program!

 
You are a wonderful wealth of information!
I know! I just cannot believe the number of other field guides out there and none of the big book chains have guides devoted to these gorgeous gems who really protect us from the nasty mosquitos... you'd figure that alone would warrant more interest! As far as I know, Audubon hasn't published their own guide about them and they seem to only have their own guides or ones that are on the same topics :(

Sooo, I would then presume that this is a male? :)

Anyhow, we won't be refidgerating any of them since even though we love to photograph them, I try to keep the kids to a hands off approach where the creatures we meet are welcome to climb on our hands but we don't pick them up, etc and always let them be if they are acting traumatized by us. Since I'm not doing this "for science" or for resale of the photos we'll just have to settle for what we get or do not get naturally, you know?

 
Glad I can help
Here is a website you might want to check out: http://www.odenews.org/. The first link on the page lists some field trips led by very knowledgable odonate experts and enthusiasts (I fall into the latter category by the way). Even if you don't immediately start netting bugs left and right, I highly recommend going on a few field trips with some of these guys so you can see the bugs up close.

It would be dishonest of me to claim that netting cannot harm dragons, because it certainly can, but dragons, at least when fully mature, are fairly hardy and take handling pretty well. I know a guy who is doing a project here in New Jersey where he captures and radio-tags dragons, releases them, and tracks their movements along a stream. I've seen video of it, and it's pretty funny because the antenna on the transmitter is longer than the dragon's body. They fly amazingly well even with the added weight.

And yes, your pennant here is a male.

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