July 1, 2013
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Uncommon Common Facts
I am still alive. I have actually been writing, although I have switched horses and plots and characters so many times I’m not sure even I can remember them. And I have been transferring my Xanga sites to Word documents so I have copies of them for my own use. Not sure what the future holds, just now, but so far I have decided to…float.
This is a recent visitor to our lawn. I took a photograph of a very similar creature last week and posted it on facebook with the question: What is it? Most people agree it’s a common whitetail dragonfly. (Although there are a number of dragonflies who look a great deal, but not exactly, like this one.)
This is the facebook picture:
Do you notice anything? Why, yes: one white tail dragonfly has…a white tail. This one does not. The top dragonfly, as a matter of fact, looks like it might be suffering some sort of mold issue.
THERE’S A WORD FOR THAT!!!!
It’s called ‘pruinescence’ and it is displayed as a territorial threat by mature male common whitetail dragonflies to whomever needs threatening in the common whitetail dragonfly world.
And even more interesting, this same process–’pruinescence’–accounts for the glaze that appears on mature grapes.
Someone in the scientific world has been very busy observing things I never even noticed before. (This from the woman who observed wild flox flowering in her garden, dying out and flowering again a month later without ever realizing, for 60-odd years, that one ‘flox’ has four petals* while the real flox has five. I’m not saying this superior vigilance is all that hard, I’m just saying it happens.)
*the first plant is actually Dame’s Rocket. I think they look a great deal alike, disregarding the extra petal thing, so that means….they both grow in Michigan.
And with that astute observation, I will return to the thrilling days of pure fiction.
