Variable Bluet
(Coenagrion pulchellum)

As its name suggests, the Variable Bluet is a black-and-blue damselfly whose markings are subject to considerable variation. Like in its twin species the Azure Bluet (Coenagrion puella), females may be either of the green or the blue form. In terms of body build, too, the Variable Bluet is quite similar to the Azure Bluet. And even in terms of their distribution, the Variable and Azure Bluets are quite similar, even though the former is very much the rarer of the two species in the South of Europe. In its most typical form, the male Coenagrion pulchellum has a Y-shaped mark on its second abdominal segment (as opposed to the U-shaped mark in C. puella) and its narrow blue antehumeral stripes are interrupted so that effectively they resemble an exclamation mark. By contrast, in puella the antehumeral stripe is uninterrupted. But even so the two species may be difficult to tell apart in the field without a close-up view of the male's appendages (more widely separated in C. puella) and the female's pronotum (more deeply incised in C. pulchellum).

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