Here’s a rerun from 2010, with a few new words and pictures.

The BugLady would like to state up front that this episode is about “pennants” (as in “small flags”), not about “penance,” which is between BugFans and their deities.

After the awesome Slaty Skimmer, some of the BugLady’s (many) favorite dragonflies are the Calico and the Halloween Pennants. The Pennants are the stuff that tattoos are made of (someday). The internet agrees; it’s light on Pennant information and heavy on Pennant pictures, but they are eye candy!

The BugLady enjoys the challenge of photographing these jumpy beauties – standing out in the field on a hot, breezy day, sweat trickling down her back, hoping for that moment of calm as the Pennants wave back and forth on the grass tops (the reason for the “pennant” part of their name is that they resemble tiny flags streaming off the weeds). Good times. In Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East, Dennis Paulson writes that, “their disproportionately long hind legs are “probably an adaptation for keeping the abdomen horizontal while tip-perching.” 

Pennants are smallish dragonflies in the genus Celithemis, in the Skimmer family (Libellulidae) and there are just eight species in the genus. Most members of the genus are southeastern, but the ranges of the Calico and the Halloween Pennants take them into the Great Plains. The Halloween and the Calico have spots in their wings and reddish eyes. The Halloween’s wings are tinted an orange-ish-yellow; the un-tinted wings of the Calico have fewer spots, but males have a spot at the base of each hind wing. Both are found near water for egg-laying but may stray far from water to forage. 

When naturalists explain the differences between dragonflies and damselflies, we tell people that damselflies can fold their wings over their bodies or hold them in a backwards-pointing “V” along their sides (the Spreadwings, genus Lestes), but dragonflies must hold their wings straight out to the side. The Pennants didn’t get the memo – perched, they often hold their front wings at a different angle than their hind wings, with their wings in several planes. 

They are found near/lay their eggs in slow-moving to still waters . Several sources said that the young/naiads of these Pennants are not very competitive, and as such they are more successful in newer waters (borrow pits, ditches, etc.) than in waters with lots of established predators. The naiads are great vegetation climbers and not-so-great swimmers.

Insects are cold-blooded, their internal temperature similar to the temperature of the air or water that surrounds them, and they appreciate a jump-start from the sun to get the juices flowing. But, cold-blooded or not, too much sun is too much sun. It is thought that the Pennants’ wing spots cast some much-needed shade on the thorax of this open-country percher. An alternate suggestion for the spots at the base of the Calico’s hind wings is that the dark color absorbs heat and warms the insect’s thorax (and, by extension, its wing muscles). Several sources mentioned that the thorax of the pennants is “reduced” without elaborating on what that means for the dragonfly. Is there a connection between a smaller thorax and the need to heat it? Don’t know. Do they have reduced wing muscles? Unlikely, when you consider their activities. 

To minimize the amount of sun that hits their body, some kinds of dragonflies (about 10% of species, including the Calico and especially the Halloween Pennants) perch in a “tail-up” posture called the “obelisk position” (). They will rotate their body to maintain the correct angle as the sun moves. But, a dragonfly with its abdomen raised may also be assuming a threat position, or if the sun is waning, may be trying for more sun exposure. 

Dragonflies are unapologetic carnivores as aquatic naiads (catching with their extendable mandibles anything in the water that is smaller than they are), and as adults (catching with their spiny legs anything airborne that is smaller than they are).

CALICO PENNANTS (Celithemis elisa) are called “Elisa Skimmers” in some books. They are small dragonflies (less than 1 ¼” long), locally common in shallow water and slow streams with emergent plants east of the Great Plains. Females and juveniles are decorated with a yellow face, yellow stigmas (the solid, pigmented spot toward the tip of the wing), and yellow, heart-shaped spots along the top of the abdomen. Where the female is yellow, the male is red. Male Calicos also have the afore-mentioned dark patch on the hind wing, near the body, like a saddlebags dragonfly.

Male Calicos are not particularly territorial, though they will chase intruding males. They may patrol a pond, flying a few feet above its surface, or they may search for a mate by perching on vegetation near the water, facing away from the pond in order to spot females as they fly in. After she mates, the female lays eggs for a few minutes in the shallow water of a pond’s edge, flying in tandem with the male. He departs and she continues to lay eggs solo, tapping her abdomen on the water’s surface, breaking through the surface film so the eggs can be washed off of the tip of her abdomen. She may deposit as many as 800 eggs.

HALLOWEEN PENNANTS (Celithemis eponina) are also called the “Brown-spotted yellow-wings” (though the BugLady has no idea why anyone would hang that prosaic name on this creature!). They were named “Halloween” for their orange-tinted, black-patterned wings, and they are considered the most colorful pennant. Like the Calicos, female Halloween Pennants sport a yellowish face, elongated yellow “hearts” along the top of the abdomen, and yellow stigmas, and males are more intensely colored. Many sources refer to them as “butterfly-like” because of their bouncy flight and colorful wings. They are slightly larger than the Calico. 

Much of their business is conducted in the morning. Mating generally occurs well before lunch, and the mating pair may ascend to 50’ in the air before getting down to tandem egg-laying in open water. Males are not territorial. The BugLady has seen Halloween Pennants over the water but not Calico Pennants (yet).

Halloween Pennants seem more unconcerned about weather than other dragonflies are. They are more likely to “obeslik;” they fly and lay eggs on windier and cooler days than other dragonflies; and they are out and about even in a light rain, shaking the water from their wings as they hunt. 

Check out a field near you next summer! 

The BugLady

The post The Pennants Redux appeared first on Field Station.

Greetings, BugFans,

The BugLady got an email from BugFan Freda the other day saying that she had located two Painted Skimmers at a nearby natural area, and she’d be glad to show the BugLady where they were (and to wear footgear that could get wet or muddy, which pretty much describes all of the BugLady’s shoes). The BugLady is 95% sure that she saw the rear end of one of the skimmers while she and Freda were poking around – she flushed a dragonfly that was the right size and shape, but it popped up and over some cattails and kept going. Thanks for the use of your pictures, Freda.

Painted Skimmers are in the Skimmer family Libellulidae, which contains many of our more common and more colorful dragonflies, and they’re in the genus Libellula – large, sturdy, showy dragonflies, often with dramatically-patterned wings, that are often referred to as the King skimmers. King skimmers have appeared in these pages before

• /field-station/bug-of-the-week/closed-for-june-spectacular-summer-dragonflies/,
• /field-station/bug-of-the-week/four-spotted-skimmer/, and
• /field-station/bug-of-the-week/slaty-skimmer-dragonfly/ (Chalk-fronted Corporals are sometimes included in the group, too /field-station/bug-of-the-week/chalk-fronted-corporal-dragonfly/)

They look like a dragonfly that was put together by a committee. Their wing spots are similar to, but fainter than, those of a (all the Painted Skimmer write-ups say “see also: Halloween Pennant”), and their abdomen looks a lot like that of a Four-spotted Skimmer, an early-flying whose wing spots are much smaller. are duller in color, with wider abdomens than . They often look golden in flight. There are many wonderful photos of Painted Skimmers online, but not much in the way of biographies.

Painted Skimmers (Libellula semifasciata) occur only rarely in Wisconsin (they’re a “Most Wanted” species here). They’re on dragonfly checklists from Texas to Florida to Maine to Ontario, becoming rarer as you travel farther north, and they’re at the edge of their range here in Wisconsin. They’re one of the fifteen-or-so species of North American Odonates that migrate (out of our 450-ish species), moving both north and south along the Atlantic Coast as well as inland. They arrive in the north early (one source said that many of the first arrivals are mature males); they often stay just long enough to get people excited (birders will sympathize); and they’re more numerous some years than others. According to the , they’ve been recorded in only seven of the years since 2000, and 2022 is the only year that they’ve been seen in multiple locations (five so far). When the Bug Lady was looking into that, she found this .

One source described them as widespread and relatively common but not often seen, due to their early flight period (they usually show up in June and July, so the influx of Painted Skimmers in 2022 is early) and to their habitat preferences. They frequent shallow, plant-filled, marshy, woodland ponds, pools, seasonal puddles, and sometimes bogs and slow-moving streams, but they may hunt for food far from water. Like all dragonflies, their aquatic young (naiads) (“nymphs,” if you must, but never “larvae”) eat the small invertebrates that they find next to them below the water’s surface, and the adults feed on flying insects. Painted Skimmer dragonflies perch on twigs and fly out to “hawk” small insects.

The Dragonflies of Northern Virginia website calls them both less aggressive and more wary than other King skimmers.

Males patrol territories and watch for females from perches on twigs or grass tips three to six feet above the water. They mate (briefly) in mid-air, he releases her, and Paulson, in Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East, tells us that “Females oviposit in low flight by vigorous and well-spaced tapping and moving some distance between groups of a few taps.” Males often patrol as she oviposits in order to protect her (and his genetic material) from being nabbed by rival males.

In her search for information, the BugLady turned up the comment on the Northern Virginia Dragonfly website (on two different pages) that “Some dragonflies have partially translucent abdomens (Painted Skimmers) and many others have dark wing patches at the base of their wings (saddlebags and pennants) – both may be anatomical adaptations to absorbing sunlight and channeling that heat to their organs and wing muscles.” She suspects that means that the dragonfly’s cuticle allows some light to pass through, and not that you can hold up a Painted Skimmer and see daylight through it. She couldn’t find any other sources to back that up.

Go outside – keep your eyes peeled. Things are popping!

The BugLady

The post Painted Skimmer Dragonflies appeared first on Field Station.