New species discovered in Taiwan, China, adding a new member to biodiversity
A research team formed jointly by the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute of the Council of Agriculture and the Taipei City Zoo has found a new dragonfly species in Taiwan, the "Slender Red Dragonfly", and this discovery has been published in the internationally renowned taxonomy journal Zootaxa
The Forestry Research Institute said that in 2007, Wu Wei-ting, who once worked at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung, collected a red-bellied dragonfly of uncertain identity in a swamp near the Lianhua Pond Research Center under the jurisdiction of the Forestry Research Institute.
Through joint work by Ye Wen-qi of the Forest Protection Division of the Forestry Research Institute and Dr. Chen Ci-long and Tang Xin-jie of the Taipei City Zoo, it was confirmed to be a new species discovered for the first time in Taiwan. Because the male insect has a slender and bright red abdomen, it was named the "Slender Red Dragonfly".
Besides being endemic to Taiwan, the "Slender Red Dragonfly" may also be the only member of its genus that is distributed on a single island and has the most restricted range. At present it appears only within Nantou County. Because its habitat is adjacent to farmland or areas frequently developed by humans, the "Slender Red Dragonfly" is highly vulnerable to human disturbance and destruction, and at the time of publication the research team had already recommended it for inclusion in the list of "endangered conservation species".
Ye Wen-qi said that there are about 150 known species of Odonata insects in Taiwan, including the two families of the stout-bodied "dragonflies" and the slender "damselflies", both of which are insects commonly seen near water. Although the adults have well-developed wings and feed on other insects flying in the air, their juvenile stage is spent in water, where they are called "naiads". They play an indicator role in freshwater habitats such as lakes and streams; once the environment is disturbed, their community composition and numbers will change accordingly.
Taiwan is located in the tropics and subtropics, and the Odonata insects living there are mainly species that prefer warm climates, but there are still a small number of groups adapted to temperate cool climates. These few temperate species may have migrated south to the island during the era of glacial expansion in order to escape the severe cold, and then remained here. Among them, the species of the genus of red-bellied dragonflies are the most representative.
Ye Wen-qi pointed out that Taiwan has previously recorded a total of 8 members of the red-bellied dragonfly genus, species widely distributed in neighbouring northern regions. Among them, the more common "Yellow-based Dragonfly" on the island mainly lives in mid- to high-altitude mountain areas; the "Flame Red Dragonfly" tends to appear in low-altitude mountain areas; in addition, the "Red-clothed Dragonfly", which was once recorded many times in the Greater Taipei area, has not been found again for many years; the remaining species are either of uncertain record status or are merely migratory dragonflies that appear briefly only in autumn.