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Identify this dragonfly with orange body and orange wings?

Biology Asked on February 3, 2021

The photo shows a red dragonfly on top (in front of some hot pink snail eggs) but an orange dragonfly with orange and perhaps translucent(?) wings near the bottom. This is the best resolution I could get. While the red one is easy to photograph (see Identify these two big, beautiful dragonflies in Taiwan?) this orange species is really jittery and difficult to approach.

I believe I have seen dozens of them in an isolated grassy patch in a parking lot, but they never landed and I could not capture a photo or see them clearly, but today this one was "available" for a photoshoot.

The orange dragonfly’s body is about 4 to 5 cm long, the location is Hsinchu county Taiwan. That’s all I’ve got, except that the last centimeter or so of the wings appear to be almost transparent.

orange dragonfly with orange wings in Hsinchu county, Taiwan

One Answer

These seem to both be Neurothemis taiwanensis.

On iNaturalist, if you search for dragonflies in Taiwan, it finds 104 species observed and submitted, and this Neurothemis taiwanensis is the most popularly-submitted species.

Browsing the gallery of photos in their database shows both red and orange varieties. If we filter the sex on just males, we see mainly deep-red ones:

enter image description here

...and filtering on just females yields mainly orange ones but also some red ones:

https://inaturalist.ca/taxa/503081-Neurothemis-taiwanensis/browse_photos?term_id=9&term_value_id=10&place_id=7887

Answered by JimN on February 3, 2021

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