Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Familiar Bluet Damselfly

I first saw this at the pool, it kept hovering over the water so I got to look for about five minutes, that is until A decided that something so shiny belonged in her hand.

The Familiar Bluet Damselfly is so named because it is found in most of the US and due to the fact that it has much more blue than other Damselflies. They interbreed with Tule Bluets, so it's lucky I happened to see a male because apparently the female Tules and Familiars look almost indistinguishable.
The Familiar Bluet has large spherical compound eyes that are blue on the bottom half and black on the top half. The thorax is mostly blue with a couple black lines on the top (as far as I can tell from all the pictures, no stripes on the bottom of the thorax). It's long, skinny, ten-sectioned, abdomen is, also, mostly blue with thin black rings around the joints. They normally are about an inch and a half long.
Being a Damselfly the forewings and hindwings are the same size and shape and when at rest the wings lay flat against the sides of the body (and look like they only have one set of wings). And their legs look like butterfly legs, six kinda fuzzy looking things.

The Tule Bluet though looks almost the same except that their abdomens are more likely to be one section blue, then one black, then one blue, etc.

No comments:

Post a Comment