"New" state record: Western Red Damsel (Amphiagrion abbreviatum)

The conundrum of red damsels in the genus Amphiagrion has been going on for years. Are there two species (Eastern - A. saucium, and Western - A. abbreviatum)? Or is there a third species (A. 'mesonum') as was thought by Leonora "Dolly" Gloyd? Or is it all one species, with a cline from west to east? 

Pair of Eastern Red Damsels (Amphiagion saucium), Livingston Co., MI

 

Montgomery (1943) noted that Eastern and Western "forms" could not be properly assigned to species, and somewhat arbitrarily designated all red damsels from northwestern Indiana as Western and the rest of the state as Eastern. Kormondy (1957) commented on a "zone of overlap" between the Eastern and Western forms, gave some measurements, but concluded that morphological features were more important than measurements. O'Brien (1999) brought up Gloyd's unfinished work on the third species and said Michigan had what appeared to be intermediate forms; he lumped all Michigan records into Eastern Red Damsel for the purposes of the Michigan Odonata Survey. Donnelly (2001) lamented that many records from the Great Plains were simply assigned to Western Red Damsel without examination and reiterated that the taxonomy of Amphiagrion was not resolved. Daigle and Pilgrim (2014) attempted to tackle the problem with DNA (but did not specify methods such as which gene regions were used) and concluded that Western Red Damsels occur to the Indiana/Ohio border...but that red damsels from western Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee were identical genetically to those from New York and Vermont.

This is by no means a complete bibliography of thoughts published on this topic. Ken Tennessen has worked up color and morphology differences based on nearly 200 individuals (unpublished, pers. comm.). We've contributed to that effort by looking at dozens specimens at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ) and Michigan State University, including many that Gloyd identified as A. 'mesonum' (her manuscript and notes on how she came to these conclusions has not been found). 

We utilized Ken's latest matrix of 2 color features, 7 measurements, and 1 structural characteristic -- some are a bit subjective and a few overlap. We determined that there were some Michigan vouchers that are strong enough candidates to be called Western Red Damsel, and so we have added this species to the Michigan checklist.

 

First, we found 4 males collected in July 1973 in Houghton County by John Perona. They were in his large collection of mostly Lepidoptera donated to the Albert J. Cook Arthropod Research Collection at Michigan State University. It included many pinned Odonata of which a large portion were unidentified; as curators of this part of the MSU collection, we have worked through the Perona material to identify, catalog, and database the Michigan Odonata.

 

One of the Western Red Damsels from the Perona collection at Michigan State University.

Another collection we have been working to incorporate into the MOS database is at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods (FSCA) in Gainesville. The Odonata collection is not digitized nor do the items have catalog numbers. Earlier this year a student, Anisha Sapkota, was hired to photograph all the adult Michigan Odonata and assign catalog numbers (more on this project in a future post). We reviewed the daily output for those we wanted to obtain on loan. This was one of those items:

 

These 4 males from Baraga County were initially identified as the Eastern Red Damsel, but then changed -- we assume by collector Sid Dunkle -- to Western Red Damsel. We confirmed the latter identification. 

 

While the eight males above seem to be the best fit for Western Red Damsel, additional work needs to be done to shed light on the distribution of Amphiagrion across North America and in particular in the middle of the U.S. There are not enough recent specimens to work with, particularly from the Great Plains, western Great Lakes, and Ohio River Valley. And specimens will be necessary to take meticulous measurements of various parts of these tiny insects, and to have the material to do additional DNA work utilizing multiple genetic regions.

 

We are currently working on pulling this project together. 

Literature cited:

 

Daigle, Jerrell J. and Erik Pilgrim. 2014. Amphiagrion (red damsel) update. Argia 26(1):19. 

 

Donnelly, Nick. 2001. Taxonomic problems with North American odonata species - a last appeal for information. Argia 13(2):5-10. 

 

Kormondy, Edward J. 1957. Records of western Odonata with notes on Amphiagrion abbreviatum (Selys). Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society 30 (3): 108-110.

Montgomery, B. Elwood. 1943. The Distribution and Relative Seasonal Abundance of the Indiana Species of Agrionidae (Odonata-Zygoptera). Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, 53:179-185.

O'Brien, Mark F. 1999. Changes to the 1999 Michigan Odonata list. Williamsonia 3(2):4-5. 

New Wayne County records

(Updated 11 Aug 2025)

Several Four new species have been added to the Wayne County checklist in 2025, based on both field work and discovery of a specimen in an institutional collection.

Here is a mid-2025 update:

Blue-faced Meadowhawk, Sympetrum ambiguum. This is an interesting species to us, one that occurs south of Michigan and apparently breeds just across the border in Ohio. We looked at all 15 specimens in the MOS database, all housed at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ). There were 9 nymphs, 2 exuvia, and 4 adults. All the nymphs, one exuvia, and 3 female adults were all misidentified. The two remaining specimens were a correctly identified adult male from Washtenaw County from 1919 collected by Mary Elizabeth McCormick, and an exuvia also from Washtenaw County from 1997 collected by Ellie Shappirio that had measurements and characteristics that fit Blue-faced but had some overlap with other species; we left it as okay for now.

On 23 July, we were on a trail close to a very slow, vegetated section of the Huron River. There were surprisingly few meadowhawks anywhere -- we had already been around the pond not far from the nature center and worked our way to the river. A meadowhawk flushed from near the ground and perched on a stick. The abdomen was very clearly ringed, rather than having triangles. We netted this teneral male for the first county voucher. The specimen is deposited in the Albert J. Cook Arthropod Research Collection at Michigan State University.

Meadowhawks are so ubiquitous and many are difficult or impossible to ID in the field that many people don't pay close attention to them. However, the ringed abdomen is distinctive and it's worth keeping an eye out for this species, especially in the southern part of the state. This individual was not mature, so it's possible this species is breeding in Michigan, or it could be an Ohio stray. 

First Wayne County voucher of Blue-faced Meadowhawk. Photo by Darrin O'Brien.

Black-shouldered Spinyleg, Dromogomphus spinosus. This is a species we've seen several times in the county since 2010. At Oakwoods Metropark on 23 July shortly after our successful Blue-faced Meadowhawk find, we continued on the trail along the Huron River. We flushed a large gomphid. When it perched again we gave it a look and remarked, rather nonchalantly because in many places this is a pretty common species, that it was a Black-shouldered Spinyleg. It took a moment for it to dawn on us that there were still no vouchers for the county. It landed close by again, but we missed netting it. 

We also saw some interesting river cruisers (Macromia sp.) on the Huron River farther upstream at Lower Huron Metropark. Examining some in the hand was our main goal for a return trip on 2 August, so we brought along a cadre of friends.

Along the river are Darrin O'Brien ("Stylurus", the Urban Dragon Hunter); David Marvin; and Dr. Anthony Cognato, professor of entomology and arthropod collections manager at MSU. In the foreground are Jordy Hernandez, one of Anthony's former graduate students and lead author of a great paper on the striped emeralds; and John Douglass, former president of the Great Lakes Entomological Society.

We saw very few dragonflies at all along the trails. If one were interested in a study of Blue-fronted Dancers (Argia apicalis), though, this would have been heaven. As Jordy and I were chatting about some non-Odonata topic, a gomphid landed right in front of us. It flushed and flew a short distance away, where it was confirmed to be a Black-shouldered Spinyleg. David was closest so we let him to the honors of snagging it for a first county voucher, also now deposited at MSU. 

David Marvin gets the first county specimen of Black-shouldered Spinyleg (Dromogomphus spinosus). P.S. David is always smiling and happy!

As far as Macromias, on 23 July we saw many and netted a handful, including at least one that was quite intriguing. But between then and our return trip with reinforcements on 2 August, a heavy rainfall raised the water levels substantially, and there were hardly any Macromias patrolling the river. 

However, Darrin and David went back to the metroparks again on 10 August, and nearly immediately David netted a male Swift River Cruiser, Macromia illinoiensis. This is also a species that we've seen on occasion over the years, but never vouchered. 

First Wayne County voucher of Swift River Cruiser. Photo by David Marvin.

The last new species for Wayne County is Taiga Bluet, Coenagrion resolutum. This damselfly is widely distributed across the state, but there are more records farther north, as the name implies.

Earlier this year, John Douglass funded a student, Anisha Sapkota, to photograph all the adult Odonata housed collected in Michigan at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods (FSCA) in Gainesville -- we will writing more about that in another post. The Odonata collection is not digitized nor do the items have catalog numbers, so adding them was part of the project. Anisha uploaded the photos she took each day, and we reviewed them for those we wanted to obtain on loan, and then proceeded to transcribe each item to include in the MOS database. I was surprised to see this turn up in the queue:

We'd never heard of H.J. Hubbard, although Henry Guernsey Hubbard is well-known to us and other students of entomological history. We have other items in the MOS database he collected in the late 1870s.

We obtained the item on loan, and confirmed it was indeed correctly identified as a Taiga Bluet. To find this species in Detroit in the late 1970s seemed hard to believe. We noted that the collector tag in the image looked suspiciously vintage to us. When we got the item, we looked at the reverse side of the other tag in the envelope (visible in the image above at the end of the abdomen of the damsel, but facing down). It read "Detroit 29.5.74". Whoever typed up this card assumed the wrong century. In vetting specimens from many collections, we have found this mistake to be very common. The handwriting and faded nature of the tag made it easy to mistake the 74 for 79. But indeed, Henry G. Hubbard and Eugene A. Schwarz collected insects in Detroit in May 1874, as documented by several biographies as well as specimens in a number of collections, most in the U.S. National Museum.

Further, I could find nothing about a "H. J." Hubbard, even doing extensive genealogical research. The tag clearly says "H.J." but perhaps it was a misprint and used anyway. This seems curious given that the Hubbards were a very well-off family. However, this peculiar middle initial switching has also appeared in a few published papers that refer to H. G. Hubbard as "H. J.", including one by his friend and graduate advisor Herman Hagen, who surely knew who he was talking about, even if whomever transcribed his manuscript (likely written in longhand) for publication did not.

Hubbard was a fascinating person and there are Odonata records of his from Michigan we have set aside to research more thoroughly. It's another item on the to-do list that will receive a separate blog post when it gets the attention it deserves.

The Wayne County checklist is now at 96 species verified by voucher specimens. 

 

[No use of photos without permission] 

New state record: Great Pondhawk

David Marvin collected a Great Pondhawk (Erythemis vesiculosa) in Ingham County on 9 June 2024, a first state record for Michigan. Although patterned like the female or young male common Eastern Pondhawk (Erythemis simplicicollis), it is larger (closer to a Common Green Darner, Anax junius) with a longer, much more slender abdomen. The hindwing of an Eastern Pondhawk is 30-33 mm, with a hindwing of >38 mm immediately keying to Great Pondhawk in Needham et al. (2014). The Michigan individual has a hindwing measurement of 42 mm. The other portion of the key's couplet (and a diagnostic character in Palacino-Rodríguez et al. 2014) indicates Great Pondhawk has a double row of cells in a particular area of the forewing, which I've pointed to below. Eastern Pondhawks have a single row in this location.

As depicted in David's photo at the top of the post, Great Pondhawks will also perch more often on vegetation rather than on the ground like Eastern Pondhawks. Great Pondhawks are described as agile, aggressive, and apt to patrol more like a darner. It wouldn't be too hard to pass them off as darners or Eastern Pondhawks without a closer look, and in fact some of the extralimital records initially puzzled or surprised the observers, or were discovered "after the fact" from photos.

Erythemis is a largely Neotropical genus. Great Pondhawk ranges from Argentina through Central America and Mexico into the southern and southwestern United States. In the US, it is most common in Texas and south Florida. Occasionally, especially in the past decade, vagrants have been sighted farther north, with more records from Oklahoma, Kansas, and Tennessee. This map is from Odonata Central.

Zooming in on the Upper Midwest, one sees that all the records north of approximately 40.6 N (the southern border of Iowa) have occurred since June 2020. With the exception of the Michigan record, all are sight records only.

There are no records from Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, New York, or Pennsylvania. The two eastern records are south of 40 N, from Arlington Co., VA (2018) and Garrett Co., MD (2023). A number of lists indicate Great Pondhawk has occurred in Missouri, but I've not yet located a source.

As is often the case when southern lentic odonate species move north, there is a lot of speculation on how environmental conditions prompt these movements, especially in light of climate change. We've addressed this issue in two previous papers on southern species we found in the state:

Craves, J.A. and D.S. O’Brien. 2007. Erythrodiplax umbrata (Odonata: Libellulidae): New for Michigan. Great Lakes Entomologist 40:96-98.

Craves, J.A. and D.S. O’Brien. 2011. Tramea calverti (Odonata: Libellulidae): new for Michigan with notes on other new reports from the Great Lakes region. Great Lakes Entomologist 44:78-82

Thus it is significant that this Michigan voucher is the northernmost I have located thus far. The next closest is from Leavenworth Co., KS from 1936, which is about 450 km south of Ingham Co., MI. 

We will again be working with Dr. Anthony Cognato at Michigan State University to use DNA analysis to see if we can determine the population origin of this individual by comparing genetic markers with other Great Pondhawks from Florida and Texas, for example. This may be able to help us connect environmental conditions such as drought in a particular region as a trigger for dispersal.

I want to note that we cannot conclude that this individual came directly from a southern population, however. Great Pondhawks fly nearly year-round in tropical latitudes and much of Texas, with a peak in late summer and fall. With over 50 records, mostly after 2006, Oklahoma dates range from 2 April to 11 August (Smith and Patten 2021). Further north, discerning true flight periods is more difficult, because we don't know whether they are dispersing from somewhere distant, or recently emerged from a closer locale. In  his book Dragonflies and Damselflies of Texas and the South-Central United States, John Abbott notes that the pseudostigmas of "young" individual Great Pondhawks are green. Here is the Michigan individual:

While I have yet to research the timing of color change in the pseudostigma, perhaps the green color and the relatively fresh appearance of the Michigan individual may suggest it did not travel hundreds of kilometers prior to its Michigan arrival, but came from a closer breeding population. Another molecular technique, stable isotope analysis, could help us greatly narrow down the latitude where this individual emerged. This can offer further insight into the population dynamics of this species, whether we determine that it made an impressive long-distance movement from a distant region, perhaps due to weather or environmental conditions, or came from a pioneer breeding population further north. 

We are often asked why we put so much emphasis on (targeted) collecting. The issues discussed here point out the value of specimens in providing answers to questions far beyond just the confirmation of identity, with implications crucial to invertebrate conservation. This specimen will be deposited in the Michigan State University Albert J. Cook Arthropod Research Collection, where we are adjunct curators of Odonata.

I can't say that this addition to the Michigan list surprised me. In fact, just hours before David's text to us about his find, Darrin and I were talking about the potential to find Great Pondhawk in Michigan -- I even had a little file that I started a few years ago when they began to pop up in the region. But, it's early days and there is further background research to do. We will be working on a paper for submission to a journal once we map out a plan and execute lab analyses. Congrats again to our friend David!

Literature noted

Abbott JC (2005) Dragonflies and Damselflies of Texas and the South-Central United States. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
 
Needham JG, Westfall MJJ, May ML (2014) Dragonflies of North America. Third Edition. Scientific Publishers, Gainesville, FL.
 
Palacino-Rodríguez F, González-Soriano E, Sarmiento CE (2014) Phylogenetic Signal of Subsets of Morphological Characters: A Case Study in the Genus Erythemis (Anisoptera: Libellulidae). Caldasia 36(1):85-106.

Smith BD, Patten MA (2021) Dragonflies at a Biogeographical Crossroads, the Odonata of Oklahoma and Complexities Beyond its Borders. CRC Press, Boca Raton, London, New York.

Finally another Wayne County record

It's been 10 years since we published our Wayne County, Michigan checklist, and this past decade it has stood at 90 species supported by voucher specimens. We moved out of the county 11 years ago, and have concentrated our efforts elsewhere. We have visited some of our old haunts more recently, but this very urban county has seen still more development, further lessening the opportunity for discovering new species, or even seeing many previously recorded ones.

This is not to say that vouchers have not been added to the Michigan database we are working on.  As we explained in our Plains Emerald post, we've been working with various watershed groups to identify the odonate nymphs they collect during their water quality surveys. We've incorporated these identifications into our data, and thus have acquired dozens of data points for nymphs in Wayne County, primarily from material from Friends of the Rouge and the Huron River Watershed Council. 

We've also been looking through the collections, both of adults and nymphs/exuviae, at the University of Michigan. We've been aware of a record of a nymph of Springtime Darner, Basiaeschna janata, for the county, but we've never been able to locate it. It is a species that was on our "hypothetical" list, because we have a sight record from Livonia in 2006. 

Looking for particular immature specimens among thousands of vials in hundreds of racks.

 
We finally came across the vial with a late instar nymph last week, stuck in a box of miscellaneous stuff rather than filed in the racks with the rest of the Aeshnidae.

The long-lost vial.

We confirmed the nymph is, indeed, Springtime Darner. Unfortunately, there is no location on the tag, and we have no information or other data from this collector, although we've searched all taxa across many collections in data aggregators. We suspect the tag in the vial is not the original, as it looks to be written by Ethan Bright, who did the initial identification. Since this isn't a particularly rare or unusual species and expected in the county, it is now tallied as the 91st on the Wayne County checklist.

This Springtime Darner was netted in Livingston County in 2018.

An update on the state record for Argia translata

In a previous blog post, we discussed the addition of Dusky Dancer (Argia translata) to the Michigan list. Our first "discovery" of this species for the state was two adult specimens cataloged in the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ) collection: a female collected on 25 June 1957 and a male collected on 7 July 1957, both by Rodger Mitchell at the University's E.S. George Reserve in Livingston County. 

We looked for these specimens at UMMZ, but couldn't locate them. Thus, we went in search of this species. On 10 September 2019, we collected a male on the Huron River at Bandemer Park, Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County. 

Male Dusky Dancer, Huron River, 10 Sep 2019.

We have also collected this species elsewhere on the Huron River in Washtenaw County, as well as the Saline River in Monroe County.

Recently, we've been working much more in the UMMZ collection. We decided to try looking for the 1957 Livingston County vouchers again. An additional motivating factor was that we have also been working with a lot of data from the E.S. George Reserve, and there are many ponds but no creeks or rivers there. Consequently, there are only a few Argia specimens, and they are all Variable (Violet) Dancer, Argia fumipennis, a species often found away from water.

In the drawer of Argia translata specimens, we found a triangle for a Variable Dancer whose data and catalog number matched one of our missing Dusky Dancer specimens.

The data sheet for the missing male "Argia translata" along with the paper triangle and matching catalog number. The triangle correctly labels it as Argia fumipennis violacea.

The damselfly in the triangle was indeed a male Variable Dancer. Although it was fragile and lacked color, you can see in the photo below that the abdomen was largely pale where it is largely dark in Dusky Dancer, and the pattern on the final segments also does not match.

 

The correctly identified, incorrectly cataloged specimen.

Last abdominal segments of a male Argia translata.

We did not locate the other missing voucher in the drawer of Argia translata specimens; once we found this one we only skimmed through the rest. We suspect that someone may have been entering data for Argia translata and, because this correctly labeled triangle was in the wrong drawer, just entered it as A. translata. This would be an unusual species for this location, and we are pretty confident the other missing item is not A. translata.

Therefore, the male we collected in 2019 is the first state record for this species.