The Most Efficient Predator You Don't Know

Via the National Wildlife Federation August/September 2014 Edition by Natalie Angier:

African lions roar and strut and act the apex carnivore, but they're lucky to catch 25 percent of the prey they pursue. Great white sharks have 300 slashing teeth and that ominous movie sound track, and still nearly half their hunts fail. Dragonflies, by contrast, look dainty, glittery and fun, like a bubble bath or costume jewelry, and they're often grouped with butterflies and ladybugs on the very short list of "Insects People Like." Yet they are also voracious aerial predators,  and new research suggests they may well be the most brutally effective hunters in the animal kingdom.

Compared to the aforementioned predators, dragonflies statistically hunt much more productively.

Dragonflies manage to snatch their targets in midair more than 95 percent of the time.

There are three key factors that enable dragonflies to hunt so successfully: their nervous system, eyes, and wings.

Nervous system:
One research team has determined that the nervous system of a dragonfly displays an almost human capacity for selective attention, able to focus on a single prey as it flies amid a cloud of similarly fluttering insects, just as a guest at a party can attend to a friend's words while ignoring the background chatter.

Eyes:
Dragonflies also are true visionaries. Their eyes are the largest and possibly the keenest in the insect world, a pair of giant spheres each built of some 30,000 pixel-like facets that together take up pretty much the entire head.

Dragonflies... have a full 360-degree of vision.

Wings:
Dragonflies are magnificent aerialists, able to hover, dive, fly backward and upside down, pivot 360 degrees with three tiny wing beats, and reach speeds of 30 miles per hour - lightening fast for an arthropod. 

In the dragonfly, the four transparent, ultra-flexible wings are attached to the thorax by separate muscles and can each be maneuvered independently, lending the insect an extraordinary range of flight options. "A dragonfly can be missing an entire wing and still capture prey," Stacey Combes, who studies the biomechanics of dragonfly flight at Harvard University, says.

While the dragonfly is a well-liked insect that people tend to enjoy seeing, it is also one of the most fascinating and efficient predators in nature, catching prey unlike any other.

-Joe