How do female dragonflies avoid male harassment?

After egg laying, female damselflies and dragonflies can be exposed to males trying to mate. Females will then be unreceptive and in order to avoid a lengthly and potentially costly copulation, they have evolved different strategies to avoid male harassment. These are only some of these strategies:

1) Avoiding water. This strategy appears to be quite general in the group. Males will return to the breeding ponds first after they mature and will be very obvious as they spend a lot of time patrolling the pond or sat on prominent perches, lake or river or hanging around near the water. In contrast, females often stay well away from the water, only returning to the breeding site to mate and oviposit. Staying away from the water allows females some control about when to mate.

2) Sneaking in. Females can be quite secretive when approaching an oviposition site, or they may lay during cloudy or cold weather - especially the larger species which can generate heat by whirring their flight muscles. Males are more likely to be roosting during dull weather or early in the morning, so females might be able to oviposit uninterrupted if they time their visit to the pond well.

3) Adopting an oviposition posture. If a male flies overhead, a female may try and repel him curving her abdomen down, like she was ovipositing. A great photo showing this behaviour in an Emperor female is here.

4) Looping the loop. Female dragonflies can fly faster than a chasing male, or do a loop the loop or even dive under water to avoid harassing males!

5) Androchromes. In many damselflies, such as the Blue-tailed and the Common Blue damselflies there is genetic variation in female colour with some of the colour forms strongly resembling males. I have covered this topic recently in Blue-tailed Damselflies.

A female Emperor with a very blue abdomen (16/07/2018). 

6) Age-related male mimicry? Females have an ability to store sperm and the sperm from a single mating should be enough to fertilise all her eggs for two weeks. In some species of dragonflies, females change as they age to resemble males (e.g. Emperor, Common Darter). The abdomen of mature female emperors is green, but it may turn blue - like a male's- when they are about 2 weeks old (it is unclear, however, it this is a purely age effect or a temperature response to warmer weather as the season progresses). If this was age-related, then male mimicry might reflect a different evolutionary response to the same selective factor than the genetic androchromes. When the female is young it is in her interest to attract males and mate, but as she ages she is likely to have already mated and the colour change might make it easier to avoid male attention. More research is definitely needed!

7) Playing dead. One of the most striking strategy of male avoidance is that of the Common (or Moorland) Hawker Aeshna cyanea (top shot). Ovipositing females often chose sheltered spots with denser vegetation in ponds to avoid male detection. As females leave ponds after ovipositing, males chase them. Rassim Kheliffa carefully documented that in such occasions, females dived into the tall grass surrounding the pond, staying motionless, often upside down, and so avoiding being grabbed by the males. The females were alert and responsive, and 87% (out of 31 attempts) where able to successfully avoid being picked by Rassim. He hypothesised that death feigning has evolved by females co-opting a pre-existing antipredator behaviour into a male avoidance strategy to avoid undesired mating attempts

More information
Corbet, P. S. The Life-History of the Emperor Dragonfly Anax imperator Leach (Odonata: Aeshnidae). J. Anim. Ecol. 26, 1–69 (1957).
Khelifa, R. Faking death to avoid male coercion: extreme sexual conflict resolution in a dragonfly. Ecology 98, 1724–1726 (2017).

Credit: Top photo of Common Hawker by Robert, used with permission.