Ebony Jewel Wing: Featured Creature for GAN0420

Not one full business day after I'd posted about requiring pots of coffee to get through the coronavirus panic, we were all notified that it was now illegal for any restaurants to allow any customers to sit down. The Nanny State really wants to give Americans a taste of socialism! Let's remember this in November, Gentle Readers. Government is not an efficient way to manage our health.

All this sitting on your hands at home, waiting for someone hundreds of miles away to tell you when they think it might be safe for you to play basketball with a friend or attend a religious service...having ideas and energy, not being allowed to go to work and use them...getting projects done, but being banned by law from selling them to your clients...this is socialism, Gentle Readers. This is what Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and similar people are really talking about when they promise that if you vote for them the federal government will be sending you free money every month. Yes, and the kicker is, the federal government won't have free money to send you for long, anyway. So when you feel that you can't wait for the coronavirus panic to be over, remind yourself: this is what everyone who's lived in a socialist country (other than Sweden) says they've been going through.

On to this month's Newsletter. Here is this month's complete Creature Feature, with color pictures. Subscribers to the printed Newsletter have the option of paying for a picture-free version.

The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published monthly by Priscilla King, c/o Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. It’s available free, in plain text as an e-mail or attachment. Printed or audiocassette versions are available for the cost of production. (Audiofiles are free to anyone who can convince me that s/he is blind and can’t read a document aloud using widely available software.) Reprinting, recirculating, and sharing this information at the reader’s own expense is encouraged, provided that all sources of material are credited.

THE CREATURE FEATURE: Damselfly

Calopteryx maculata (female)

Here, courtesy of Clconroy at Morguefile, is the most conspicuous kind of damselfly found in eastern North America, the Ebony Jewel Wing. Actually its English name seems backward. In sunshine they often look like jewels on ebony wings.

Calopteryx maculata (male)

Courtesy of Explorenayarit at Pixabay, this one is male. Generally males gleam in shades of emerald green, sapphire blue, turquoise, or jade depending partly on their individual base color and more on how the light hits them, and females are glossy black; but this general rule is not always reliable. Some females can look more colorful and some males can look black. The reliable gender indicator that's obvious to humans is that females have white dots on the tips of their wings, and males don't.

In most of the eastern and central part of North America, these damselflies are widely distributed, well known, and well liked. They deserve to be well liked. Although the adults fly around looking gorgeous for only a few weeks in summer, these little animals live for more than a year, and they spend most of that time eating gnats, flies, and mosquitoes.

Damselflies are in the insect order Odonata, which includes all damselflies and dragonflies. Though damsels are thinner than dragons and can indeed be eaten by dragons, they're not necessarily smaller or weaker. Ebony Jewel Wings are one of the bigger damselfly species. With bodies two or three inches long and wingspans over two inches, they're bigger than some dragonfly species.  Big damsels and small dragons are evenly matched and more likely to avoid each other than to kill each other. Mostly they eat the nuisance insects that attack humans. However, Ebony Jewel Wings and Green Darner dragonflies are among each other’s main predators.

None of the Odonata eats warm-blooded prey. If you were cruel enough to grab them in your hands they would bite, scratch, and squirm, and their sturdy little jaws can pinch, but they're not likely to break the skin on your hand. If they perch on your arm, willingly, they're not going to bite you; they are hoping to bite something else that was going to bite you. 

When I was growing up, possibly to counteract the stupid old story about any insect "sewing up mouths" of people, children were told "If a dragonfly perches on you, and you can hold still long enough for somebody to snap a picture, you will be famous." I even saw a few other kids' pictures in local newspapers, proving that this was true. However, the Odonata don't often perch on humans, and I didn't have an opportunity to find out that I personally couldn't hold still that long until I was thirty-eight years old.

All of the Odonata hatch from tiny, barely visible eggs left in or near water. Hatchlings live in water, growing through several changes of skins to somewhere near their adult sizes, before they climb out and molt into their winged adult forms. Young Odonata may be called larvae, nymphs, or naiads. Dragonfly naiads may look like beetles with hairs or spikes on their backs instead of wings. Broad-winged damselfly naiads look like small wingless damselflies. They live in mud, are muddy-colored, and avoid being stepped on or eaten mainly by seeing other animals approaching and darting away. Though dragonfly naiads’ spikes and damselfly naiads’ tail segments are pointy and may make the animals harder to swallow, they contain no venom and provide little defense when predators grab naiads.

Baby damselflies’ tails may have inspired the peculiar pointed ends sometimes drawn on the tails of mythical monsters. That wasn’t very scientific. The leaf-like, or even Valentine-heart-like, shape at the posterior end of a damselfly naiad is actually the gills the animal uses to extract oxygen from water. Such a structure would be useless to a mythical fire-breathing dragon.

Ebony Jewel Wings make themselves easy to observe, so we know a bit more about them than we do about many of the thousands of Odonata species. They show only a tiny hint of family feeling—which is still more than some of the other Odonata have. Such family instincts as they have are more parental than romantic. After mating a couple will stay together for a day or so. The female tucks each egg into a different decomposing plant stalk, where rising water will disperse her eggs over hundreds or thousands of miles. The male seems definitely to be trying to guard and protect the mother of his offspring, as best he can, while she lays eggs. If he mates again during this time he’ll try to protect both females, probably an overall loss to the species. Once the eggs have been deposited the two adults may mate again with each other, or with others. If anything they are more likely to separate. Males tend to like to stake out territories, while females have a motive to look for fresh egg-laying sites. Individuals rarely travel as far as half a mile. Parents aren't likely to live to see their offspring.

All of the Odonata have elaborately alien reproductive parts and processes. When mating the broad-winged damselflies curl their bodies into a heart-shaped position in which the male can fly, carrying the female, if he has to. The tail segment has vestigial claspers, not as well developed as an earwig's or caterpillars, which the insects use to hold on to each other while mating. The position is probably more comfortable than it looks because, although damselfly eggs can be fertilized in less than an hour, most pairs hold this position for three hours or more.

Photo supplied to Wikipedia By Kevin Payravi - Own work / Cropped from File:Calopteryx maculata mating.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34124668

What qualifies Ebony Jewel Wings to be featured in a Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is that their egg distribution process depends on the kind of tall, stalky plants that are often considered “weeds” and destroyed by glyphosate spraying. The more of these “weeds” mature, die, and dissolve naturally into a stream, the more damselflies have a chance to survive. According to Wikipedia, their favorite plants include “yellow water lily, hydrilla, lizard's tail, pickerelweed, common cattail, upright sedge, common bladderwort, common duckweed, black willow, orange jewelweed, spotted Joe-Pye weed, poison ivy, wild grape, sassafras, common greenbrier, and buttonbush.”

While some of these plants are minimally damaged by glyphosate spraying, others are threatened by the spraying and by the overgrowth of really undesirable nuisance species that typically follows spraying. The damselflies themselves are more directly harmed by insecticides but are not found in glyphosate-sprayed marshes.

Ebony Jewel Wings were abundant in my part of the world when I was growing up. They were among the first insects I learned to recognize as a “friendly” species, as a child. I remember noticing that local individuals always seemed to be sapphire blue, emerald green, or coal black in the sunshine, and wondering whether the black, blue, and green ones were different sub-species, or whether turquoise-colored individuals I saw in other places were. This species seemed to survive the DDT years better than most insects did.

As DDT and other poisons like chlordane and malathion were banned, I was glad to see new species of Odonata, but disappointed by a local decline in Ebony Jewel Wings. As an adult I observed that most nature parks in Maryland center around bodies of water. Often the water is stagnant and the ground is swampy, but Maryland’s abundant “wetlands” are protected by a rich variety of mosquito-eating lifeforms, including many species of Odonata. Though Asian Tiger mosquitoes make being outdoors in formerly nice suburbs a miserable experience, they are not a problem in those marshy nature parks.

Growing up in Virginia I’d seen exactly two kinds of dragonflies in addition to the Ebony Jewel Wings, which were the dominant species. In Maryland I saw red and blue dragons and pale blue damsels for the first time. Knowing that any naiad is likely to eat any smaller naiad competing for food in the same pond explained why there was a greater variety of species with no obviously dominant species.

Back home, competition from those other Odonata species that were rebounding from DDT did not explain the decline in Ebony Jewel Wings. The damselflies I loved to watch as a child have not been replaced by a wider variety of Odonata, or by anything else but growing populations of gnats, flies, and mosquitoes. According to BayerScience, glyphosate could not be to blame. I’ll agree that this species’ regular population redistribution by water levels causes natural variations, and might allow different Odonata to thrive in the same places in different years...but glyphosate certainly is not helping damselflies.

There are over 100 other kinds of damselflies. Most are smaller than Ebony Jewel Wings. A few are bigger. None of them harms humans. All of them eat nuisance insects and very little else. Nine broad-winged damselfly species are found in North America. Appalachian Jewel Wings, which are found in other parts of Virginia but I don't think I've ever seen one, have the same blue-to-green-to-black iridescent bodies as Ebony Jewel Wings but their wings are greyish. Sparkling Jewel Wings have transparent wings, sometimes with spots at the tips. River Jewel Wings have dark bodies with yellow stripes and mostly transparent wings with color at the tips. Superb Jewel Wings have translucent brownish wings. Ruby Spots may or may not show bright red color on the head and wing joints; this coloring deepens with age, and males develop it before females do.

 

This Superb Jewel Wing looks clearly different from Ebony Jewel Wings in a well-lighted photo. In real life, and in less clear snapshots, pictures are confusible although they are distinct species and don't mix. Photo supplied to Wikipedia By Mike Ostrowski from North Bethesda, Maryland, USA - Superb Jewelwing, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17315499

It can be hard to identify damselfly species from pictures! We know this English damselfly is not an Ebony Jewel Wing because Michael Apel says it was found in a place where Calopteryx virgo, the Beautiful Demoiselle, is found. (In good clear pictures like this one, the copper-colored eyes and wing joints are also clues. On stock photo sites such features aren't always clear.)

Photo supplied to Wikipedia By Michael Apel - photo taken by Michael Apel, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=842997

Bluets are another family of damselfly species. Some Bluets are bigger than Ebony Jewel Wings; there's a Big Bluet and a Little Bluet, and a few dozen others. Not all of these damselflies share the pale blue color for which they're named, and some prefer to call them Narrow-Winged Damselflies. They have narrower wings and more club-shaped tail segments than the Broad-Winged Damselflies. As Virginia recovers from DDT I've seen some Bluets here, but I don't remember seeing this "Familiar Bluet" until I went to Maryland.

 

Photographed By Bruce Marlin - Own work http://www.cirrusimage.com/damselfly_Enallagma_civile.htm, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2132267 .

This blue to white color is common to several kinds of Odonata. Called pruinescence, from Latin pruina, "frost," it typically develops as damsels or dragons age, and usually appears on males earlier in life than it does on females. It produces interesting patterns and shadings as the blue coating develops over body surfaces that might have been black, red, or yellow when the insect first began to fly. Some Bluets don't seem to develop it, like this Scarlet Bluet from Canada...

Photographed By Jim Bell, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57287765 . There are also Cherry, Burgundy, Orange, Golden, and Florida Bluet species in which most individuals show no blue color at all. 

For those who like old songs, it may be interesting to know that there is a Blue-Tailed Damselfly. The names of confusible species tend to reflect confusion. This little damsel wouldn't have bitten a pony. It probably wouldn't even have tackled the big horseflies that were biting the pony. It's not likely to be found in North America, anyway; it's a European species. And the species comes in a wide range of colors; what individuals have in common is the blue segment at the tail end.

 

Photographed By I, Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=891189

Though most of them are small and may be inconspicuous, these damsels are good mosquito killers, too. Many of them are also known to lay eggs in decaying plant stalks.