BRN 9-2 (uncompressed) - Flipbook - Page 85
Records of Vivid
Dancer from the
Black Range in Grant
and Sierra Counties,
New Mexico
by Jonathan Batkin
Vivid Dancer, Argia vivida (Hagen in
Selys, 1865), is one of New Mexico's
most poorly documented damselßies.
Despite published range maps
showing nearly statewide distribution, it has rarely been collected in the
southern half of the state or east of
the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Argia vivida barely overlaps the range
of the confusingly similar Springwater
Dancer, Argia funebris (Hagen, 1861).
In Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico
the two species have seldom been
documented in proximity to one
another.
A "western" form of A. funebris, with
males exhibiting varying amounts of
violet coloration (see top on the
following page), occupies most of the
species' range in New Mexico. An
"eastern" form (see bottom on the
following page), which can vary in
tone from sky blue to a bright blue
similar to that of A. vivida, is predominant in Eddy County, where it
has been mistaken for A. vivida. The
blue form is not dominant in other
parts of New Mexico but does occur.
The intertwined histories of description of the two species reßect their
similarities. Argia vivida was
described by Hermann Hagen in 1865
(Hagen in Selys, 1865: 406Ð407).
Agrion funebre, described by Hagen
in 1861 (Hagen, 1862: 92), was
redescribed by him as Argia funebris
in 1865 (Hagen in Selys 1865: 398Ð
399). In 1902, Philip P. Calvert, who
acknowledged Argia funebris as a
distinct species, described Argia
vivida var. plana (Calvert, 1902: 96),
treating what is popularly known as
Springwater Dancer as a subspecies
of Vivid Dancer.
In 1958 Leonora Gloyd deÞned
differences between A. vivida and A.
vivida var. plana based on examination of caudal appendages of more
than 100 specimens Ñ of the former
from California and of the latter from
Arizona and Texas. She elevated
Argia plana to species rank and added
Vivid Dancer (Argia vivida), Aztec, San Juan County, New Mexico, 7 July 2025.
Photo by the author.
that "all specimens taken in the
region between the Mississippi River
and Rocky Mountains, some of which
have been recorded in the literature
by various authors as vivida, are
actually a blue form of plana" (Gloyd
1958: 19Ð20). Garrison and von
Ellenrieder examined specimens on
which Hagen and Calvert based their
descriptions, plus more than 600
specimens of A. plana collected in the
U.S. and Mexico, south to Guatemala,
by themselves and others. They
concluded that A. plana was "a junior
synonym of A. funebris," restoring the
latter as the scientiÞc name for
Springwater Dancer (2022: 87).
A. vivida is known roughly from
southern British Columbia, southern
Alberta, Montana, and southern South
Dakota south to Baja California,
southern Nevada, Arizona, New
Mexico, and Nebraska. In Mexico it
occurs only in Baja California.
A. funebris is known from Arizona,
New Mexico, southeastern Colorado,
and the northern plains south through
Texas and Mexico to Honduras and El
Salvador. It does not occur in Baja
California, but there are scattered
records further east in the United
States.
Prather and Prather (2015: 16,17)
reported that in Colorado, A. vivida
and A. funebris were found near each
other only on the southeastern plains
in El Paso and Pueblo Counties, but in
both counties the species were
separated by 30 km. A. vivida occurs
in northern and western Arizona, and
84
sympatry with A. funebris was
documented by Bailowitz et al. only
on the Bill Williams River on the La
Paz/Mohave County line (2015: 159).
Rich Bailowitz explained to Rosser
Garrison that "the species were
allotopic, with A. funebris occurring at
seeps where water oozed from the
below-impoundment soil of the
Alamo Lake dam, and A. vivida along
the creek below the dam, perhaps a
few hundred feet below these seeps"
(Garrison and von Ellenrieder 2022:
88).
Perception of the distribution of A.
vivida in New Mexico has been
inßuenced by the Dot Map Project,
initiated in 1994 by the late Thomas
W. Donnelly. Data contributed by
more than 100 odonatologists or
derived from literature resulted in
maps illustrating the distribution of
every known species in the United
States and Canada by county or its
Canadian equivalent (Donnelly 2004).
Some Dot Map records from New
Mexico lack supporting voucher
material and are now treated in the
Odonata Central (OC) database
(Abbott, J.C. 2006Ð2025) as declined.
Some specimens reported to be at the
Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History (USNM) by one author
(Evans 1995) cannot be located, and
still others in museum collections are
strongly suspected to be incorrectly
identiÞed. All of those issues apply to
records of A. vivida, several of which
are still accepted on OC and have
been the basis of misleading range
maps.
