{"id":12278,"date":"2021-06-01T11:27:28","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T16:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/field-station\/?p=12278"},"modified":"2021-06-01T11:28:27","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T16:28:27","slug":"taiga-bluet-damselfly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/field-station\/bug-of-the-week\/taiga-bluet-damselfly\/","title":{"rendered":"Taiga Bluet Damselfly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howdy, BugFans,<\/p>\n

It\u2019s spring, and it\u2019s time to brush up on our bluet damselfly IDs because they\u2019re starting to hit the airways. Most bluets are 1″ to 1.3″ long and, as their name suggests, males are at least partly blue with a blue tip at the rear. Visually, our 20-ish Wisconsin species are split into the black-type bluets<\/a> (males with abdomens that are mostly black), the blue-type bluets<\/a> (with abdomens mostly blue), the intermediate bluets<\/a> (with roughly equal blue and black\u2014sometimes a judgement call), and \u201cother\u201d\u2014the very-colorful Orange, Vesper, and Rainbow Bluets. Identification can be a bear, but the claspers at the tip of the male\u2019s abdomen are diagnostic. Bring your hand lens (or your macro lens). Females are tricky, too, often having several color forms.<\/p>\n

\"bluet\"<\/a>Taxonomically, there are two groups of bluets\u2014the American bluets, in the genus Enallagma<\/em>, and the Eurasian bluets, in the genus Coenagrion<\/em>. There are about 30 species Eurasian bluets, but only three species are found here, at the northern edges of the New World (or at higher elevations slightly farther south), and the rest live in the Old World. Bluets are in the Pond Damsel family Coenagrionidae<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"bluet\"<\/a>TAIGA (pronounced TY\u2019 gah) BLUETS (Coenagrion resolutum<\/em>) are a lovely, early, black-type bluet that is common in Wisconsin and very common across Canada. They\u2019re usually the first damselfly the BugLady sees each spring, reminding her that she has spent the winter forgetting anything she ever knew about bluets. It\u2019s our northernmost-flying damselfly, found in the northern half of North America all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. (The resolutum<\/em> part of its name is said to reflect its fortitude in the face of a cold climate.) It lives near quiet waters like bogs, marshes, ponds, and spruce and tamarack swamps. (The Taiga or Boreal forest biome is a swampy forest made up of conifers that covers a good part of the far (far) north, around the globe.)<\/p>\n

Males are often green\/aqua-tinged. (Bugfan Bob notes that juvenile males go through a lilac phase.)<\/p>\n