Azure Damselfly (Coenagrion puella)

Sooner or later I’m going to run out of beautiful posterboy species but definitely not just yet.

Azure Damselflies are pretty special beasts. The males are a piercing blue and the females a slightly less predator attention grabbing green, but for me the amazing thing is how slender they are. They dash around on a blur of inadequately flimsy wings with chopper pilot bravado, and at any moment I almost expect them to simply break apart with the effort of it all.

I filmed a large group of perhaps twenty or so pairs laying their eggs (ovipositing) in tandem. Each male clasped to a female’s thorax as she dipped the tip of her abdomen below the pond’s surface, leaving a single egg with each splash. Apparently they prefer to oviposit ‘en masse’ as a defense strategy, employing the same technique as other tasty looking creatures by presenting a confusingly large number of individuals.

So, options paralysis, the ‘slacker’ affliction which means that when you’re presented with a multitude of choices you inevitably choose none, clearly works to some species’ advantage elsewhere in the animal kingdom.