Blue Dasher Dragonfly Male - Pachydiplax longipennis
Order Odonata (Fabricius, 1793) - dragonflies and damselflies.
Live male adult dragonflies photographed in the wild at Alpharetta, Georgia and DuPage County, Illinois, USA.
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Blue Dasher Dragonfly Male
Blue Dasher's famous iridescent green eyes (munching on crane fly prey)

Blue dashers rarely sit in one spot for long. The males are constantly patrolling their territory, dashing out from their perch to challenge other dragonflies or large insects flying nearby, and looking for females with which to mate.

Blue Dasher Dragonfly Male

Dragonflies have excellent eyesight. Their compound eyes have up to 30,000 facets, each of which is a separate light-sensing organ or ommatidium, arranged to give nearly a 360° field of vision, important for taking prey on the wing, as has done the female shown above.

Odonates are completely harmless - they do not sting or bite. Indeed, they are beneficial in the same respect spiders and other predators are beneficial - they keep the burgeoning insect population in check. Many of these species prey on each other; I often see dragonflies with damsels in their clutches.
Dragonflies are among the most ancient of living creatures. Fossil records, clearly recognizable as the ancestors of our present day odonates, go back to Carboniferous times which means that the insects were flying more than 300 million years ago, predating dinosaurs by over 100 million years and birds by some 150 million.

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