Damselfly Adventure!

The Augusta Creek in Kellogg Forest was our destination for viewing the behavioral ecology of the ebony jewel-wing damselfly (Calopteryx maculata). The males are various blue-green colors and the females are a more dull color with a white spot at the end of their wings.

Male Damselfly

Female Damselfly

One of our main focuses of our research was to identify the most common locations of male and female damselflies along the stream. We wanted to know what areas were the most popular and try to hypothesize why.

Me and my group decided to watch different areas of the stream and see which were the most active.  We observed the sunny areas along with the shaded areas to see if the behaviors varied at all. After observing we tried capturing as many damselflies as we could from each area to measure their color on a color chart (shown below) and note any differences.

 

OUR RESULTS: We found that the damselflies are a lot more active in the sun then they were in the shade.  We noticed that there were many more damselflies enjoying the sunny areas as opposed to the shaded, more covered areas.  

Two males perching high on a tree

 While in the sunny areas the male-male fights tended to be more common because they were defending their territories.  I would have liked to get a picture of it, but they never lasted very long. The one factor that didn't seem to change between the different areas was the color of the male damselflies.  They were all different bright green colors. So there wasn't much color variation at all.