134 DRAGONFLIES OF NORTH AMERICA 
91. Epiaeschna heros Fabricus 
Fabr. 1798, p. 285: Mtk. Cat. p. 117: Howe 19, p. 50: ’23, p. 125: Garm. ’27, 
p. 196. 
Syn: multicincta Say 
Length 82 mm. Expanse 116 mm. Me., Ont. and S. D. to Fla. and Tex. 
This is a very large and handsome, strong flying species with brown body and 
more or less smoky wings. Face brownish, paler on sutures. Frons with diffuse 
blackish border next the transverse apical carina. Vertex bilobed, black. Occiput 
brown. Thorax brown in front with 2 broad greenish stripes divergent below, 
with long, slender points, and dilated above beneath the collar. Sides brown with 
2 very broad greenish stripes; the rear one widened superiorly. Legs black. 
Wings subhyaline, the membrane more or less deeply tinged with amber brown; 
costa and subnodus yellow; stigma brown. Abdomen brown with black carinae; 
a half ring of greenish on the base of segment 2 includes the small scale like 
auricles in the male; a middorsal ridge on 10 ends in a triangular spine. Ap- 
pendages black, hairy internally in the male, smooth and leaf like in the female. 
22. AESCHNA Illiger 
The Blue Darners 
By Elsie Broughton 
Expanse 78-100 mm. 
This cosmopolitan genus is represented in our fauna by eighteen 
species. The wings are moderately broad with a well developed anal 
loop. The radial sector is more or less sinuate and 
is forked unsymmetrically. Vein M, rises either just 
before the stigma or opposite its inner end. The 
males have an anal triangle of two or three cells and 
a pair of auricles on the second abdominal segment. 
The eyes are broadly contiguous. The thorax has 
on each side a pair of lateral pale stripes the form 
of which is more or less characteristic of the species. 
These stripes are of four main types (Fig. 33): (1) 
moderately broad, the anterior margins nearly 
straight and parallel; (2) the anterior margin, es- 
pecially of the first, excavated by the body color 
of the thorax; (3) the anterior margin, of the first 
at least, excavated, sometimes rectangularly, and 
with a dorsal posterior spur; (4) slender, the first 
one bent twice, nearly at right angles. One species, 
Fia.31. Nymphof jnterrupta, shows great lack of conformity, possess- 
Aeschna umbrosa. . é : 
ing lateral pale stripes ranging from long, slender, 
parallel stripes, through broader ones with excavated anterior margins, 

