Robberfly eating Damselfly

[Erland R.N.]

Guessed I should pop by and show an image of mine from a trip to Portugal. I was at the summercamp following the 1st European Congress on Odonatology (Dragonflies). I had a wonderful time with professional and armature odonatologist from more than 25 European contries.



The damselfly being eaten is a male Enallagma cyathigerum. I do love dragonflies and damselflies but robberflies are a great photosubject too.

Photo taken with Canon 5D, Sigma 180 and just slightly cropped off edges.

cheers
Erland

Link to the picture on flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23985726@N ... otostream/

[pbertner]

Must have broken your heart! Even looks like the poor damsel is shrieking. Excellent shot with great detail. Amazing how fast robbers must be to be able to catch damsels and flies! Are they strong enough to overpower dragonflies as well?
Paul

[Erland R.N.]

Nah, I enjoy every aspect of the lifes of dragonflies, and really get ecited with my camera when dragonflies eat or gets eaten.

Here a page by a friend of mine, who has a photo of a Robberfly eating a dragonfly. The dragonfly is an Eastern Pondhawk and is itself known to take rather large prey, sometimes other species of dragonflies larger than itself.
The Robberfly in the picture got the upper hand for sure though.

http://greglasley.net/predators.html

Erland

[Ken Ramos]

Great photo , wouldn't it be nice to take something like that and have it preserved and mounted in a vacuum globe for display. I took a look at the predatory images in the link provided. Seems as though these insects have a really rough life from robber flies to birds feeding on them.