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Robert Armstrong

Robert Armstrong

Robert Armstrong

FAIRBANKS — Flying into Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge last summer to hunt for dragonflies, John Hudson, the foremost authority on dragonflies in Alaska, was impressed.

“He called it a dragonfly factory,” said Lisa Saperstein, a wildlife biologist at Kanuti who joined Hudson on his dragonfly safari.

The 1.6-million-acre refuge north of Fairbanks is dominated by wetlands, which is prime habitat for dragonflies, Hudson said.

“There’s just an incredible abundance of wetlands — bogs, beaver ponds, oxbow lakes,” he said. “We crawled out of the float plane when we landed at Kanuti Lake and dragonflies were literally landing on us.”

More dragonfly species — 20 — have been documented in the Kanuti refuge than anywhere else in Alaska, including a new species — the prairie bluet damselfly — which was discovered by refuge biologists doing a random inventory of terrestrial insects in the summer of 2004.

The purpose of Hudson’s week-long trip to Kanuti last year, funded by a grant written by Saperstein, was to confirm that there was breeding population of prairie bluets in the refuge. It was a success.

“We found quite a few of them,” said Hudson, an aquatic biologist from Juneau. “Just about every water body that had floating or emerging vegetation had them.”

How they ended up at Kanuti Lake is anybody’s guess. The closest known population of prairie bluets is about 1,000 miles away in northeast British Columbia. The dragonflies could have been carried in by floats on a float plane, Hudson said.

“That’s a considerable range expansion for this bug,” he said.

So far, the only prairie bluet damselflies found in Alaska have been at Kanuti Lake, though Saperstein thinks she may have caught one in Fairbanks recently in the peat pond at the intersection of Goldstream Road and Murphy Dome Road. She plans to have Hudson look at the bug this week to confirm it.

Hudson and Juneau photographer Bob Armstrong, co-authors of the guide book “Dragonflies of Alaska,” will be in Fairbanks for a lecture tonight at the UA Museum of the North at 7 p.m. They will also be the featured guests at the first annual Dragonfly Day at Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge on Saturday. They will lead walks and teach people how to catch and identify dragonflies.

In addition, Hudson and Armstrong will host workshops at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offices in Fairbanks, Coldfoot and Tok to teach dragonfly identification.

“The idea is to get people out and about in different parts of state to do some collecting to get a citizen science effort going to document the diversity and distribution of dragonflies in Alaska,” said Saperstein, who helped coordinate Dragonfly Day and the Fish and Wildlife Service workshops.

The more people know about dragonflies, besides the fact they eat mosquitoes, the better chance there will be to find and identify new species in Alaska, Hudson said.

There are 33 dragonfly species that have been identified in Alaska, which include seven species of damselflies. The difference between dragonflies and damselflies, both of which belong to the insect order Odonata, is in the eyes and wings. True dragonflies hold their wings spread horizontally when at rest and the eyes are connected at the top of the head. Damselflies have widely spaced eyes and hold their wings together above their body or partly open when at rest.

Dragonflies overwinter in the form of larvae or eggs in water or ice. In the Interior, the first dragonflies emerge from their larval exoskeletons in late May or early June when the temperature warms, though they appear to be behind schedule this year because of cool weather.

“They kind of lay low if it’s cool,” said Saperstein, who has seen a few damselflies and whitefaces, little, black dragonflies with yellow or red markings but no big blue darners yet.

Dragonflies live only about eight to 10 weeks, breeding multiple times before dying.

Identifying dragonflies isn’t difficult with the help of a guide book, Hudson said. Many are recognizable by counting spots and noting colors on the abdomen and other parts of the body, as well as body shapes, Hudson said.

“The lay person can get out there and readily identify at least half without having a microscope,” he said.

There are probably more dragonfly species in Alaska that haven’t been found yet because nobody has been looking, Hudson said. Their tour through the Interior also will allow Hudson to catch more dragonflies. The prospect of “collecting” specimens along the Dalton Highway has Hudson excited.

“It’s nice being on the frontier of dragonfly research here,” he said.

In Europe, researchers have already documented a change in distribution for some dragonflies as a result of climate change and the same thing is likely to happen in Alaska, Hudson said. One dragonfly in Alaska, the treeline emerald, occurs only above treeline, which is creeping its way north in Alaska.

“As Alaska warms it may run out of habitat,” Hudson said.

Contact staff Writer Tim Mowry at 459-7587.