Spatterdock Darner Dragonfly Habitats: T-Spotted Forehead With Pale Surround

Summary: North American spatterdock darner dragonfly habitats get blue/green-eyed and marked bodies, forked claspers and T-spotted foreheads with pale surrounds.

Spatterdock darner dragonflies (Rhionaeschna mutata) favor fishless ponds, abundant vegetation, especially with their favorite plant, spatterdock or cow lily or yellow pond-lily (Nupha advena); photos by Blassage Photography, Rockton, Winnebago County, north central Illinois: Elbel for Everyone @elbel4everyone, via Twitter Feb. 21, 2018

North American spatterdock darner dragonfly habitats appreciate vernal pool-loving naturalists and water garden-loving cultivators in distribution ranges from Nova Scotia through Virginia and Tennessee, Kansas, Wisconsin, Ontario and Maine and everywhere in-between.

Spatterdock darners bear their common name for spatterdock perches and ovipositing sites and knitting needle-like abdomens and the scientific name Rhionaeschna mutata (peaked misshapen [spear] changed). Common names claim the consensus of scientific committees convened by the Dragonfly Society of the Americas, whose 12th Bulletin of American Odonatology concerns odonates in Montana. Descriptions in 1861 by Hermann August Hagen (May 30, 1817-Nov. 9, 1893), cousin of physicist Georg Adolf Erman (May 12, 1806-July 12, 1877), drive scientific designations.

Spatterdock darner life cycles expect boggy and fishless ponds with flowering water lilies such as spatterdock and water shields and with nearby fields and shrubby woodlands.

May through September function as earliest to latest flight seasons even though June furnishes wildlife mapping opportunities in Canada's and the United States' spatterdock darner niches.

Spatterdock darners go on erratic, leisurely flights 10 to 15 feet (3.05 to 4.57 meters) above the centers of ponds and the tops of vegetated fields. They halt every 10 to 15 minutes to hunt as hawkers of immobile or mobile, low-flying or low-lying invertebrate prey around spatterdock and other flowering plants. They investigate intermittent perches on shrubby twigs in nearby woodlands before and subsequent to foraging itineraries that immobilize invertebrate prey within clawed legs and lower lips.

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

spatterdock darner dragonfly (Rhionaeschna mutata); MacCready Reserve, Liberty Township, Jackson County, south central Michigan; Saturday, May 27, 2017, 12:21:06: Don Henise (Kiskadee 3), CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

Spatterdock darners know blue-eyed, blue-spotted, blue-striped bodies as males and, as females, blue-eyed, blue-spotted, blue-striped bodies, blue-eyed, blue-spotted abdomens, green-striped thoraxes and brown-green-eyed, green-spotted, green-striped bodies.

Incomplete metamorphosis links rod-shaped eggs laid by females in the underwater tissue of spatterdock and water shield stems, multi-molting larvae, naiads or nymphs and molted tenerals. Molted, recently emerged, shiny-winged, tender-bodied, weak-flying tenerals manage permanent colors and physical and sexual maturation before mating and, as single mothers-to-be of subsequently orphaned eggs, ovipositing. Aphids, beetles, borers, caddisflies, copepods, crane flies, dobsonflies, gnats, leafhoppers, mosquitoes, rotifers, scuds, water fleas and worms nourish neotropical darner members of the Aeshnidae dragonfly family.

North American spatterdock darner dragonfly habitats offer season-coldest temperatures, northward to southward, from minus 45 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 42.11 to minus 15 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 spatterdock darners.

Blue-eyed, blue-marked, male-colored andromorphs and brown-green-eyed, green-marked female-colored, short-claspered heteromorphs queue up as rarer adult female spatterdock darners than quite common blue-eyed, blue-spotted, green-striped, long-claspered intermediates. Adult males reveal black T-spotted foreheads like females, dark, not female-like pale, stigmas (colored cells near wingtips) and three forked claspers, not two female-like, narrow appendages. Adults show off a neotropical darner-specific first abdominal segment bump, 2.91- to 2.99-inch (74- to 76-millimeter) head-body lengths and 1.73- to 2.01-inch (44- to 51-millimeter) hindwings.

Black T-spotted foreheads with pale surrounds, blue/green-eyed, blue/green-marked bodies and forked male claspers tell spatterdock darners from other odonates in North American spatterdock darner dragonfly habitats

spatterdock darner dragonfly (Rhionaeschna mutata) head and wings -- remains found at Ten Acre Pond, Scotia, Centre County, central Pennsylvania; Frost Entomological Museum/Pennsylvania State University (PSUC), University Park, Centre County, central Pennsylvania; photo by Andrew R. "Andy" Deans, Frost Museum director; Thursday, June 20, 2013: Frost Museum, 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:

Spatterdock darner dragonflies (Rhionaeschna mutata) favor fishless ponds, abundant vegetation, especially with their favorite plant, spatterdock or cow lily or yellow pond-lily (Nupha advena); photos by Blassage Photography, Rockton, Winnebago County, north central Illinois: Elbel for Everyone @elbel4everyone, via Twitter Feb. 21, 2018, @ https://twitter.com/elbel4everyone/status/966321788719390722

spatterdock darner dragonfly (Rhionaeschna mutata); MacCready Reserve, Liberty Township, Jackson County, south central Michigan; Saturday, May 27, 2017, 12:21:06: Don Henise (Kiskadee 3), CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/kiskadee_3/34821164731/

spatterdock darner dragonfly (Rhionaeschna mutata) head and wings -- remains found at Ten Acre Pond, Scotia, Centre County, central Pennsylvania; Frost Entomological Museum/Pennsylvania State University (PSUC), University Park, Centre County, central Pennsylvania; photo by Andrew R. "Andy" Deans, Frost Museum director; Thursday, June 20, 2013: Frost Museum, CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/93467196@N02/9095600541/

For further information:

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Available @ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154324455559604

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Available @ https://sites.psu.edu/frost/2013/06/20/remains-of-the-day/

Elbel for Everyone ‏@elbel4everyone. "The Spatterdock Darner, Rhionaeschna mutata, requires shallow, fishless wetlands w/ emergent vegetation incl. Spatterdock. You can find them in their high quality, native habitat @ Mud Lake/Elbel Park in early summer." Twitter. Feb. 21, 2018.
Available @ https://twitter.com/elbel4everyone/status/966321788719390722

Hagen, Hermann. "10. AE. mutata! Aeschna mutata Hagen!" Synopsis of the Neuroptera of North America. With a List of the South American Species: 124-125. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. IV, art. I. Translated from Latin to English by Philip Reese Uhler. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, July 1861.
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