Sections

The 2008 Entomology class of Imperial College (me included) were fortunate to have the late Philip Corbet give lectures on Odonata, recounting his fascinating experiences with their aerial stunts and inspiring us with his knowledge on biology and ecology.

I had been meaning to read his final book on Dragonflies, co-authored with Stephen Brooks, since it was published in 2008 but have only recently aquired it.

I have yet to complete reading it, but have enjoyed what I’ve read so far. One thing that struck me was the recommendation for the adoption of a new English name for the suborder Anisoptera; whilst the members of suborder Zygoptera are collectively known as the damselflies, the Anisoptera are generally known as dragonflies, which is the same English name we use for the entire order. Whilst there have been other proposed solutions for exclusively referring to the Anisoptera (such as using a lowercase ‘d’, hyphenating the name ‘dragon-flies’ or leaving a space ‘dragon flies’) none have been universally adopted in English nomenclature. To remedy this Corbet and Brooks (2008, p.7) suggest the following:

Odonata: dragonflies
Zygoptera: damselflies
Anisoptera: warriorflies

Aeshna mixta - a warriorfly

Ischnura elegans - a damselfly

I like the term warriorflies and its use makes sense, so I shall be using it for now on.

Reference:
Corbet, P. and Brooks S. (2008) Dragonflies. London, Collins.