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Australian Species

The Complete Field Guide to Dragonflies of Australia (Gunther Theisinger and John Hawking) lists 112 Zygoptera (Damselflies) and 211 Anisoptera (Dragonflies) – 323 Odonata in all. I have added a recent addition so the list is now 324 species. I am not entirely sure how much use such an extensive list may be but since I jumped through a few hoops to format it as I like it, I thought I’d publish it anyway.

At the time of writing, I have made two visits to Australia hunting dragonflies, one ad hoc and one intense, so have seen only a limited number [56] personally. However, I love Australia to bits and hope to make further visits to add to my tally. As with my other checklists, those linked to species pages are those that I have seen.

For lists that are a manageable size, I generally stick to the sequence of species that the guide books use (which I confess I don’t understand). In this case, however, searching by eye for a species within a list of 200+ seemingly randomly sequenced names is very arduous; anything other than alphabetical seems to me less than useful. So here I’ve sorted them into alphabetical order within the suborders of Zygoptera and Anisoptera.

Zygoptera (Damselflies)

Anisoptera (Dragonflies)