Teamwork

He wasn't actually trying to help her, of course - he just wanted to make sure that no other male got to her and removed his sperm before she'd laid the batch of eggs he'd just inseminated, and in reality he was as likely hindering her as helping - but viewed through anthropomorphic lenses it does look like teamwork. And to be fair, he chose this water-fringe flower (Nymphoides peltata) as an oviposition site, for which I'm grateful, because until he caught hold of the flower she'd been laying all her eggs into the undersides of the mat of leaves, which wasn't nearly as interesting, photographically speaking. In a day of slim pickings, Odonata-wise, and even thinner ones image-wise, I've had no difficulty at all in making this my photo of the day.

According to Steve Cham, writing in the Bloomsbury Field Guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of Great Britain and Ireland, Red-eyed Damselfly oviposition can get much more interesting than this - but you'd need a waterproof camera housing to photograph it. He states that tandem pairs sometimes descend as much as half a metre below the water surface before the female finds a substrate she likes, and that underwater oviposition can take up to half an hour. The female survives this by trapping and holding large bubbles of air between her wings and her thoracic spiracles, which provide her with oxygen and prevent her from drowning. Mr Cham doesn't say anything about the male having the same ability, and maybe he doesn't, or at least doesn't trap air as effectively, because apparently he will sometimes release the female when she's ovipositing underwater, returning to the surface and leaving her to get on with it by herself. When she's finished, she lets go of the submerged vegetation into which she's been laying, and the bubble of air under her wings brings her back to the surface. I'm genuinely sad that I can't link you to a film of this, but I haven't been able to find one on line.