Textbook narratives, which tell naught and show little of the adventures and autapomorphies that inflict every taxa, preferring instead to reduce the wealth of life on earth into single, generic species programmed to act with manufactured uniformity, also consign to plodding steps their lifelong struggle for survival, which in reality is a game of thrones where the victors are not necessarily the strongest and swiftest, and in which chance, in the shuffling of genes and vagaries of the environnment, and choice, in the decisions of sparring rivals and watchful mates, conspire to explore the limits of phenotypic expression and chart the associated gains in traits and losses in parts.
In observing odonates at some length, it becomes clear that sweeping descriptions fail to capture the diversity of methods used by the insects to secure their progeny. The females certainly lay their eggs in water. But some forget themselves, sinking to dangerous levels to insert their spawn, either alone or with their mates in firm attendance. Some barely get their feet wet, enjoying the stiff grip of males who play sentinel and take off in tandem when trouble looms. Others stay high and dry, cutting slits in reeds or depositing their clutch in treetop puddles or muddy banks. Damp moss, bromeliads, sewage lagoons, bamboo shoots, overhanging foliage and the grassy fringe of seasonal marshes also serve as oviposition sites that escape the depredations of oviphagous fish and opportunistic snails.
Within local woods, phytothelmata, abandoned receptacles and ephemeral pools in swampy terraces provide refugia for the odonates of broken canopies. Male dark-tipped forest skimmers, large dragonflies with bright blue coats and brown-yellow eyes, guard territories abutting waterlogged tracks, dashing to and fro with imperilled regularity to survey their perimeters before returning to a favoured perch. Where their flightpaths cross, Cratillia metallica may clash with grenadiers, which though markedly smaller, are similarly defensive of their breeding grounds. Below this livery of red and blue, clinging to the tips of curving leaves, are the sylvans, delicately built damselflies with electric blue thoracic markings that are barely apparent in the shadows above the seeps. Their wings are always held slightly ajar, but Coeliccia flees with reluctance, flinching a little when subject to unwelcome flashes of light and rising with languid effort to vanish on a nearby twig when pursued in earnest.
Short-lived waterbodies with a carpet of fallen leaves, though inaccessible to most piscine insectivores, are nonetheless visited by frogs, swamp eels, backswimmers and diving beetles. The dragons that thrive in this company have hatched and conserved strategies to shield their young from danger before the nymphs emerge to join the feeding frenzy. Podolestes orientalis, a large, long-legged damselfly that holds its hyaline wings wide apart, can be fairly abundant in these isolated wetlands, but the flatwings' presence seldom overwhelms – the adults rarely stray from the shade and their black and grey-blue stripes appear to deflect rather than draw attention to their slim profiles in a jungle of chiaroscuro hues. Their sex life is, to human eyes, a cloak-and-dagger affair, with few signs of courtship and a gamut of invisible cues that culminate in a brief wheel of hearts. Thereafter, the female, with her mate at hand, selects a stalk above or near the water and embeds her eggs into gashes carved by her ovipositor.
Sharing the flatwings' domain are small dragonflies that raise hell with furious displays of strength. Males of Tyriobapta torrida, when not attached to a vertical trunk, vie for dominance over stagnant pools, chasing each other around the swamp with audible fury and flaunting their colours in pockets of solar energy that illuminate their hindwing patches. After mating, the female dips her abdomen into the water to flick droplets of eggs towards the bank, repeating this cycle of strokes until her supply, or stamina, is exhausted. This approach probably helps the treehuggers, which, like other libellulids, have lost the tools to insert their eggs into botanical refuges, minimise losses to aquatic foragers that stick to deeper zones.
Some dragonflies choose spawning sites with little room for manouervre: swimming pools, water tanks, flooded roofs and feeding troughs where the fast-growing nymphs feast on other insect larvae or, in the absence of other prey, each other until a few attain adulthood. Pantala flavescens has cornered this ecological niche to conquer the globe, though its penchant for indiscrimination often causes the gliders to regard every shiny surface as a suitable substrate. One female, with her mate still in tandem, assaulted the scorching metal of a parking lot in the heart of Manado, where minibuses discharged hapless tourists into a cul-de-sac of dusty wares. Other libellulids also make questionable selections; female scarlet skimmers by the Maliau Basin in Sabah have been observed scorning a weedy creek, preferring to deposit in shallow ruts made by off-road vehicles. The eggs could well hatch in the damp mud, but it seems unlikely, though not impossible, that the neonates would have the means to escape dessication with a three-metre march to the closest brook.
Aeshnids are the only dragonflies in the region to retain endophytic habits. Like damselflies, female hawkers possess abdomens with a cutting edge, which allows them to pierce the fibres of streamside vegetation. Slender herbs and thin brush, however, lack the capacity to support the largest of the lot, a brute with the wingspan of a small bird and the presence of a ghost. Tetracanthagyna plagiata ranges across Sundaland but is rarely seen, as these giants hang high above lowland swamps and feed only at dusk and dawn. But the females, which bear the bulk of their species' burden, put in extra hours to atone for beastly dalliances, scanning their habitats for fallen logs and dead wood at the height of day.
The genus was erected in 1898, but the species was first described in 1877 from a Bornean specimen. And it was here, nearly a year ago, by a trail near the Maliau Basin Studies Centre, that a bruiser with pitchy brown wings and a body as thick as a finger laid her eggs early one afternoon, having settled on the high end of a stump about three metres above a winding trickle with steep banks. The hawker proceeded to probe the bark with a monstrous ovipositor, her abdomen flexing like a segmented worm as she injected a batch of protoformed hunters into the ligneous flakes. Odonate legs are not built for walking, so the ungainly steps of the labour were apparent in her slow inching up the trunk to gouge the chips and complete the mission of a mother who wields a stick that stabs before it spills.
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