Damselfly

A few months back, looking through my friend's remarkable website, I came across pictures of an insect called the "damselfly." Beautiful long, slender body with colours on it which seemed to have been painted on by a Color Field painter. They look, admittedly, a little unreal, almost as if a photographer who got bored of the dull colors around himself wished them into existence. During a 'wildlife trip' with the same photographer friends, I, for the first time, saw a damselfly. You have to be in love with these delicate creatures to even spot one. They are extremely difficult to spot, but once you do find one they are like fragile, tiny epitomes of ephemerality. Gorgeous! My eyes had to get used to the macro way of viewing things to keep track of the little fairy. It was literally skipping from blade to blade, throwing a challenge to huge fumbling clumsy human beings.

Most people probably do not even know of their existence. And with their appearance they seem to be effectively keeping things that way. Even if you happen to see one, before you know it, it's not there anymore.
Just for the sake of information let me include some details about this creature. So, although not many seem to have heard of this species, there are more than 4 and a half thousand species of damselflies worldwide. As adults it is fairly easy to distinguish between a dragonfly and a damselfly. The damselfy, as i said before, has a long slender abdomen, and at rest it hold its wings to its sides unlike a dragonfly which spreads its wings on either side straight out. They are extremely strong fliers, and can perform awesome aerial aerobics...! However, possibly because of their larger size and greater body mass, dragonflies are better fliers than damselflies. It is believed that they have great eyesight, their beautiful compoud eyes have up to 28 thousand individual facets. each of these facets points to a different direction and produces a tiny image which its brain then puts together to form the larger picture.

The suborder of the damselfly is Zygoptera, and they belong to the order Odonata along with dragonflies.

The photograph above is something I took sometime back, but if you wish to see really awesome pictures of dragon and damselflies, you should go here.