A checklist of odonates Kerala State is presented in this paper. Scientific binomen, vernacular names Malayalam, IUCN Red List status, and endemism are also given. total 174 species have been recorded from till date, 65 which endemic to the Western Ghats, 10 India. Five fall under various threatened categories IUCN. None occurring listed schedules Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act or appendices ...

Aggression between species is a seldom-considered but potentially widespread mechanism of character displacement in secondary sexual characters. Based on previous research showing that similarity in wing coloration directly influences interspecific territorial aggression in Hetaerina damselflies, we predicted that wing coloration would show a pattern of character displacement (divergence in sym...

Male genitalia in several insect species are asymmetry in right and left shape. However, the function of such asymmetric male genitalia is still unclear. We found that the male genitalia of the damselfly Calopteryx cornelia (Odonata: Calopterygidae) are morphologically symmetric just after emergence but asymmetric after reproductive maturation. Males remove rival sperm stored in the female burs...

Interspecific territoriality may be adaptive if territories contain depletable resources that are valuable to both species, but it can also arise as a maladaptive by-product of intraspecific territoriality. In the latter scenario, sympatric species ought to diverge in ways that reduce interspecific fighting. We studied 4 Hetaerina damselfly species that can be found in sympatry in North America...

Resilin functions as an elastic spring that demonstrates extraordinary extensibility and elasticity. Here we use combined techniques, laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to illuminate the structure and study the function of wing flexibility in damselflies, focusing on the genus Rhinocypha. Morphological studies using LSCM and SEM revealed that resili...

I review methodological problems that can lead to false evidence for selection on secondary sexual characters and present a study of selection in rubyspot damselflies (Hetaerina americana) that avoids these pitfalls. Male rubyspots have a large red spot on each wing that grows to a terminal size after sexual maturity. Selection gradient analyses revealed evidence for positive sexual and surviva...

Many species of insects have been reported to show seasonally declining size at emergence. This has been explained as an adaptive response to time constraint between size and age at maturity (emergence). We studied seasonal variation in the size of damselfly Calopteryx virgo L. in six different creeks in central Finland. The length of hind wings was measured for 942 males and 285 females coveri...

-! studied the sex-limited red spots on the wings of male rubyspot damselflies (Hetaerina americana) in relation to territoriality and fitness in the wild. Both observational and experimental (wing spot manipulation) studies indicated that wing spots were selected through competition among males for mating territories, not through female choice or direct competition for females. Males with natu...