Robust Baskettail Dragonfly Habitats: Spiny Claspers, Spotted Wing Base

Summary: North American robust baskettail dragonfly habitats get blackened foreheads, hairy, spotted thoraxes, spiny claspers and spotted abdomens and wing bases.

German entomologist Hermann August Hagen (May 30, 1817-Nov. 9, 1893) described the Robust Baskettail in 1878; 1866 portrait of Hermann Hagen and his wife, Johanna Maria Elise Gerhards Hagen (1832-1917), by Gottheil & Sohn, Koenigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia): scan by Neumann-Meding, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

North American robust baskettail dragonfly habitats appall cultivators, not naturalists, with sodden distribution ranges from New Jersey through North Carolina and selectively in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

Robust baskettails bear their common name for heavy bodies and egg string-tipped abdomens and the scientific name Epitheca spinosa (upon a case [with male] spiny [claspers]). Scientific classifications count upon categorizations contributed in 1878 by Hermann August Hagen (May 30, 1817-Nov. 9, 1893) to collaborations correctly cited currently as Hagen in Selys. Scientific designations draw upon descriptions declared as done by Hagen in publications, from 1845 onward, by Michel Edmond de Sélys Longchamps (May 25, 1813-Dec. 11, 1900).

Robust baskettail life cycles expect boggy ponds and lakes and slow-flowing woodland swamps along wooded lakes and rivers with forest edges, open woods and sunny clearings.

March through June function as earliest to latest flight seasons even though March or April furnishes wildlife mapping opportunities throughout coastal and inland robust baskettail niches.

Robust baskettails go from night-time roosts out on food-searching and perch-seeking flights along forest edges and on mate-seizing patrols of small, sunlit clearings in swampy woodlands. They hang obliquely from perches under slanted twigs on wetland trees along forest edges and in open woodlands and wooded clearings and head out along watersides. Their itineraries include investigative interludes over water and imprisoning flushed, opportunistic or stalked invertebrate prey within dark, segmented legs and projectable, retractable lower lips for ingestion.

Ants, assassin flies, biting midges, ducks, falcons, fish, flycatchers, frogs, grebes, lizards, spiders, turtles and water beetles and mites jeopardize North American robust baskettail dragonfly habitats.

Robust Baskettail (Epitheca spinosa), Chub Sandhill Natural Area Preserve, Sussex County, southeastern Virginia; observed Friday, Apr. 17, 2020, 10:09 a.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time): pbedell (Paul Bedell), CC BY SA 4.0 International, via iNaturalist

Immature robust baskettails keep red-brown eyes and yellow-marked bodies whereas mature females and males respectively know dark, milky red and bright emerald or metallic aqua-green eyes.

Incompletely metamorphosing life cycles lead from egg-clustered strings laid on submerged vegetation, to immature, little adult-like, multi-molting, nonflying larvae, naiads or nymphs and to molted tenerals. Immature stages metamorphose into shiny-winged, tender-bodied, weak-flying tenerals that manage physical and sexual maturation and muster permanent colors before mating and manipulating eggs into ovipositing sites. Aphids, beetles, borers, caddisflies, copepods, crane flies, dobsonflies, gnats, leafhoppers, mosquitoes, rotifers, scuds, water fleas and worms nourish baskettail members of the Corduliidae emerald dragonfly family.

North American common baskettail dragonfly habitats offer season-coldest temperatures, north- to southward, from minus 45 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 42.11 to minus 1.11 degrees Celsius).

Beech, bellflower, birch, bladderwort, cattail, daisy, grass, greenbrier, heath, laurel, madder, maple, nettle, olive, pepperbush, pine, pondweed, rush, sedge, water-lily and willow families promote robust baskettails.

Basally-thickened abdomens with orange-yellow egg string-filled tips, dark, milky red eyes and slender claspers as long as the ninth abdominal segment qualify as adult female hallmarks. Adult males reveal black triangle-marked foreheads, brown-spotted hindwing bases, downward-, outward-bending, spine-tipped claspers, long-, white-haired, yellow-, side-spotted brown thoraxes, orange-yellow faces and yellow-, side-spotted brown abdomens. Adults show off 1.65- to 1.77-inch (42- to 45-millimeter) head-body lengths, 1.26- to 1.38-inch (32- to 35-millimeter) abdomens and 1.14- to 1.29-inch (29- to 33-millimeter) hindwings.

Brown-spotted wing bases, protracted hovering, spiny-tipped claspers, steady flight, yellow-spotted abdomens and thoraxes tell robust baskettails from other odonates in North American robust baskettail dragonfly habitats.

Left rear wing of Robust Baskettail (Epitheca spinosa) or of Common Baskettail (Epitheca cynosura)? German entomologist Hermann Hagen noted closeness of spinosa to cynosura and also to Spiny Baskettail (Epitheca spinigera) in his description of specimens obtained in 1876 in Georgia by American entomologist and collector Herbert Knowles Morrison (1854-1885): bgv23, CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

German entomologist Hermann August Hagen (May 30, 1817-Nov. 9, 1893) described the Robust Baskettail in 1878; 1866 portrait of Hermann Hagen and his wife, Johanna Maria Elise Gerhards Hagen (1832-1917), by Gottheil & Sohn, Koenigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia): scan by Neumann-Meding, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hagen_Hermann_August_1817-1893.gif

Robust Baskettail (Epitheca spinosa), Chub Sandhill Natural Area Preserve, Sussex County, southeastern Virginia; observed Friday, Apr. 17, 2020, 10:09 a.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time): pbedell (Paul Bedell), CC BY SA 4.0 International, via iNaturalist @ https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/42468517

Left rear wing of Robust Baskettail (Epitheca spinosa) or of Common Baskettail (Epitheca cynosura)? German entomologist Hermann Hagen noted closeness of spinosa to cynosura and also to Spiny Baskettail (Epitheca spinigera) in his description of specimens obtained in 1876 in Georgia by American entomologist and collector Herbert Knowles Morrison (1854-1885): bgv23, CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/panamapictures/4505597162/in/photolist-7S9n4G

For further information:

Armantia. "Herbert Knowles Morrison." Find A Grave Memorials. Oct. 30, 2004.
Available @ https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9729704/herbert-knowles-morrison

Beaton, Giff. Dragonflies & Damselflies of Georgia and the Southeast. Athens GA; London UK: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Berger, Cynthia. Dragonflies. Mechanicsburg PA: Stackpole Books: Wild Guide, 2004.

Bright, Ethan. "Epitheca Burmeister, 1839 (Baskettails)." Aquatic Insects of Michigan > Odonata (Dragon- and Damselflies) of Michigan > Anisoptera Selys, 1854 - Dragonflies > Corduliidae Selys, 1850 (Emeralds).
Available @ http://www.aquaticinsects.org/sp/Odonata/sp_oom.html

Groll, Eckhard K. "Hagen, Hermann August." SDEI Databases of the Senckenberg Deutsches Entomologisches Institut > Biografien der Entomologen der Welt. 05.08.2016.
Available @ http://sdei.senckenberg.de/biographies/information.php?sprache=_deutsch&id=9255

Paulson, Dennis. Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, Princeton Field Guides, 2011.

Sélys-Longchamps, M. Edm. (Michel Edmond) de. "Secondes Additions au Synopsis des Cordulines: 19 bis. Cordulia spinosa, Hagen." Bulletin de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et les Beaux-Arts de Belgique, quarante-septième année (série 2), tome XLV, no. 3 (séance du 2 mars 1878): 188-189. Bruxelles (Brussels), Belgium: F. Hayez, MDCCCLXXVIII (1878).
Available via Biodiversity Heritage Library @ https://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/5689141
Available via HathiTrust @ https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924106526449?urlappend=%3Bseq=198

"Tetragoneuria spinosa." James Cook University-Medusa: The Odonata - Dragonflies and Damselflies > Anisoptera > Corduliidae > Tetragoneuria.
Available via James Cook University-Medusa @ https://medusa.jcu.edu.au/Dragonflies/openset/displaySpecies.php?spid=935

"The 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map." The National Gardening Association > Gardening Tools > Learning Library USDA Hardiness Zone > USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map.
Available @ https://garden.org/nga/zipzone/2012/