Favoritos de griff

Tramea lacerata (and fish)

Another instance of fish going for ovipositing Tramea lacerata. The other pictures in this sequence were not very cohesive but this one kind of shows the pace of the action.

Sometimes the attack happened during the site selection (while both hovered in tandem close to the water's surface) and sometimes during the female's release to oviposit; unfortunately I did not qualify any of this data at that point in my interest.

I watched this type of encounter many times and the fish probably did not have much more than a 50% success rate (by my calculations from sampling one pond about 20 times during the spring/summer).

Often the couple was disrupted and the tandem broken but both escaped. I wonder the amount of energy it takes for a fish to propel itself with such force. Obviously it's worth it even without a 100% payoff but still...how much nutrition is in one dragonfly?