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St. Croix Snaketail
File:St. Croix Snaketail.jpg
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Arthropoda
Class:	Insecta
Order:	Odonata
Suborder:	Anisoptera
Family:	Gomphidae
Genus:	Ophiogomphus
Species:	O. susbehcha
Binomial name
Ophiogomphus susbehcha (Vogt & Smith, 1993)

The St. Croix Snaketail or Wisconsin Snaketail (Ophiogomphus susbehcha) is a dragonfly of the family Gomphidae, native to North America. It was discovered and described by Smith and Vogt in 1993 who gave it the common name St. Croix Snaketail in honor of the St. Croix River on which it was found.

Description

Adults

Face is pale yellow below and green above, eyes are gray-blue. Thorax is bluish-green with dark shoulder stripes and a black rear thoracic side stripe.

Abdomen features yellow triangular top spots pointing away from the head on segments 2-8 with the size of the triangles decreasing as you move away from the head. Segment 9 features only a yellow dot while segment 10 is mostly yellow.

Sexual Dimorphism

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Habitat

Adults lay eggs in fast moving deep water and adults prefer tree canopy. These two hard to sample places are part of the reason the species was not identified until 1993.

Behavior

Aquatic nymphs are known to burrow shallowly in sandy river bottoms. Adult males patrol territories and perch on vegetation in fields.

Discovery

Scientist Smith collected dragonfly exuviae, on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix River in the summer of 1989. Sixteen of the specimens were from a snaketail species he had never seen before and they did not match any known species.

"So in November, he recalled, while wading in the frigid river in water deep enough for me to barely stand in, which is unusual for dragonfly larvae, I came up with half a dozen dormant larvae that looked just like the skins he'd collected the summer before. Back in Madison, Mr. Smith placed the larvae in a large cold aquarium and gradually warmed the water and increased the exposure to light to break the larval dormancy. Finally, in February, the larvae climbed out of the water, shed their final skin and hatched into magnificent clear-winged adults with bulging, bright green eyes, emerald thorax and black abdomen with bright yellow markings.

Right away I knew it was a new species, he said. But to be absolutely sure he could describe it fully and accurately, he returned to the river the next summer to snag some of the naturally emerging adults, which he and Mr. Vogt named Ophiogomphus (the genus for snaketail) susbehcha (the Lakota Sioux word for dragonfly), now known as the St. Croix snaketail.

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