Diplacodes haematodes (Scarlet Percher)

IUCN Status: not yet assessed

We have to be somewhat mad to get into dragonflies. All the obvious things like colour and pattern don't work for identification, partly because the males and females vary in form, and partly because teneral they change colouration as they mature. So you end up looking for things like the number and shape of the cells in the wings or other minor markings that are stable.

This is a teneral male. When they first burst out of their nymph shells as new dragonflies, their colouration is a yellow brown. As adults, the males are a vivid, stunningly bright red: hence the common name.

So just to show you how crazy identifying dragonflies can be, if you look through the wing at the body, you can see two small dark spots, one above the other. The bottom spot is the "metastigma" (one of the openings that allow air/oxygen into the insect). The top spot is just a marking, but it is useful in identifying this species.