A casual stroll in search of birds and insects at the foothills of the Nilgiris at Kallar, near Coimbatore, on June 7 turned an unforgettable day for Gopal Kirshnan and Ravindran Kamatchi of Nature Society of Tiruppur.
Mr. Krishnan spotted an unfamiliar dragonfly perched on a shrub and asked Mr. Kamatchi to photograph it.
“Mr. Krishnan used to tell scientific names of almost every dragonfly and butterfly when he sees them. Though he could not tell the name of this dragonfly at the place, it came as a surprise in the evening that it was Megalogomphus superbus, a dragonfly endemic to Western Ghats, photograph of which was not available so far,” says Mr. Kamatchi.
The photo was shared with odonates experts in the Facebook group named Odonates of Western Ghats, members of which first identified the species.
“Though the species is also there in the checklist of dragonflies in Kerala, nobody photographed it. The species was never reported seen in Tamil Nadu after British entomologist F.C.Fraser. The species was identified by experts at Odonata of India and other parts of the country,” says Mr. Krishnan who also photographed the dragonfly.
According to Kalesh Sadasivan of Thiruvananthapuram-based Travancore Natural History Society, Fraser has described sighting of the species in 1931 and 1934 at Boluvampatti, Walayar (Kerala-Tamil Nadu border) and Kallar.
“He has given taxonomical descriptions of the dragonfly in the book Fauna of British India based on which Mr. Krishnan’s sighting was verified. The dragonfly belongs to gomphidae family which has six dragonflies – two in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, one in Sri Lank and three others in the northeast. The two species in Tamil Nadu and Kerala come under Megalogomphus genus namely Megalogomphus hannyngtoni and Megalogomphus superbus. Megalogomphus hannyngtoni is seen in Kerala and the photographing of Megalogomphus superbus by Mr. Kamatchi and Mr. Krishnan at Kallar was the first,” says Dr. Sadasivan.
Vinayan Nair, another odonates expert from Kerala, adds that the sighting and photographing of Megalogomphus superbus at Kallar gain significance as this happened after a gap of nearly nine decades.