The biggest of all
It has the largest wingspan of any living damselfly or dragonfly.
The cloud forest · Dragonflies, damselflies and mayflies
Helicopter damselfly
Megaloprepus caerulatus
A giant damselfly with a pencil-thin body and long, narrow wings tipped with dark blue and white.
- Size
- Wingspan up to 19cm
- Look for it
- All year round
- Where
- Wet forest from Mexico to Bolivia
Drifts after you, wings turning slowly. Move your pointer and see.
When to look
Helicopter damselfly
Good to know
Six things about the helicopter damselfly
Like a helicopter
It beats its four wings slowly and one after another, so the coloured tips seem to spin like rotor blades.
It eats spiders
It hovers in front of a web, darts in and plucks the spider off, then bites off the body and drops the legs.
Its pond is in a tree
It lays its eggs in rainwater that collects in holes in tree trunks.
Fierce young
The young eat mosquito larvae, tadpoles and each other. Usually only one survives in each hole.
He guards his puddle
A male defends a good water-filled hole for weeks, and chases other males away.
The real thing
Photos of the helicopter damselfly
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
How to spot one
Look in sunny gaps where a tree has fallen. The slow blue-and-white flicker of its wing tips is all you see at first.
How to help
It needs old forest with big trees that have water-filled holes. It disappears from forest that has been logged.
Keep going
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