Hanging Around
by Deborah Benoit
Title
Hanging Around
Artist
Deborah Benoit
Medium
Photograph - Original Photography By Deborah Benoit
Description
Taken in Port Orange, Florida.
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Many adult dragonflies have brilliant iridescent or metallic colours produced by structural coloration, making them conspicuous in flight. Their overall coloration is often a combination of yellow, red, brown, and black pigments, with structural colours. Blues are typically created by microstructures in the cuticle that reflect blue light. Greens often combine a structural blue with a yellow pigment. Freshly emerged adults, known as tenerals, are often pale coloured and obtain their typical colours after a few days, some have their bodies covered with a pale blue waxy powderiness called pruinosity; it wears off when scraped during mating, leaving darker areas.
Non-iridescent structural blue in the green darner, Anax junius; the female (below) lacks blue.
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Some dragonflies such as the green darner, Anax junius, have a non-iridescent blue which is produced structurally by scatter from arrays of tiny spheres in the endoplasmic reticulum of epidermal cells underneath the cuticle.
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The wings of dragonflies are in general clear apart from the dark veins and pterostigmas. In the chasers (Libellulidae), however, many genera have areas of colour on the wings: for example, groundlings (Brachythemis) have brown bands on all four wings, while some scarlets (Crocothemis) and dropwings (Trithemis) have bright orange patches at the wing bases. Some Aeshnids such as the brown hawker (Aeshna grandis) have translucent pale yellow wings.[25]
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Dragonfly nymphs are usually a well-camouflaged blend of dull brown, green and grey.
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May 16th, 2015
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