Description
A female damselfly on a leaf at Oaks Bottom, in profile, lit from behind so the whole insect glows. Bronze eye, olive and black thorax, legs braced, wings folded neatly along her back.
She is the same kind of animal as the electric-blue ones elsewhere in this collection. She is just not advertising.
Female damselflies are markedly duller than the males in most of our species — olive, bronze, brown, dusty green instead of that startling sky blue. People often assume they are a different species, and they photograph them far less often, which means half of every population goes largely unrecorded.
There is a reason for the difference, and it is not decorative. The male’s blue is a signal — it is for being seen by rivals and by mates. Her problem is the opposite one, because of what she has to do to lay eggs.
A female damselfly does not scatter eggs. She has a blade-like ovipositor and she uses it to cut slits into plant tissue, inserting the eggs one at a time into stems and leaves at or just below the waterline. That takes time, it happens at a fixed spot, and it leaves her completely exposed.
And in some species she goes further than that. She climbs down a stem and submerges herself entirely, working underwater for as long as half an hour or more, breathing from a thin film of air trapped against her body by those fine hairs. When she is finished she has to break back out through the surface, which for an insect this size is a genuinely dangerous piece of physics.
Being difficult to see is not modesty. It is equipment for the job.
One last curiosity, because it complicates the tidy story. In a number of damselfly species some females hatch out looking like the males — the same bright blue, in a form biologists call an andromorph. The leading explanation is that it reduces harassment: males pursue anything that looks female, relentlessly enough to interfere with feeding and egg-laying, so a female that reads as male at a glance gets left alone to work. Nature arrived at the disguise long before anybody thought to write about it.
This is a high-resolution digital download of the photograph, made at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge in Portland, Oregon — yours to print for your home or office, set as a wallpaper, or simply keep. The backlight and the muted colors make this the quietest of the damselflies here, and it hangs beautifully as a pair with one of the blue males.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 3840 × 2560 pixels — sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 12.5 × 8.5 inches at 300 DPI, and considerably larger for wall display. Delivered as an instant download the moment your order is complete.
License: Personal use only. Print it for your own home, use it as a wallpaper or screen background, enjoy it yourself. Not licensed for commercial use, resale, redistribution, or AI training. © Jonathan Swanson / JonSwan Productions. All rights reserved.