On first look at a dragonfly, you may think “so cute, tiny little things, with flimsy wings.” Well, may be to us it is indeed a cute little insect, nothing harmful, but among the insect kingdom, it is a nightmare. It didn’t get its name “dragonfly” for nothing. It is a horror-evoking predator among the insect kingdom. Nature has architectured it in a fantastic way as to be more efficient and deadly enough. In fact, we humans too stole some of the ideas in making the warfare drones and helicopters from this nature’s design.

If you have seen eyes of goat or a cow, you may see that the eyes are on the sides. While they do really have a greater field of vision compared to human, they always have a soft blind spot a little bit in the front and back, so it may be considered close to 320-degree vision. We humans have just 180 degree vision, a flat front vision (not considering the obscuring nose, which our brain chooses to ignore). We have no idea of what is going behind us. I remember as a school-going kid me and my classmates used to make fun of the teacher while she faces the board and no one gets caught in action since we were very good at changing our postures instantaneously. Sometimes she used to say “wish I was a dragonfly.” Back then, it made no sense to me. Now I realize the meaning in it. Dragonflies have 360-degree vision. Nothing escapes from its field of vision. It can see all around. That privilege makes it an efficient predator.

Moreover, it’s eye is not a single unit like ours. It is a compound unit. The best I can say as an example is if a single apple is our eye, dragon’s fly eye is like a bunch of grapes, where each grape is an individual eye. It has 36,000 such units in each eye (see the mosaic-type rows and columns on its eye), so if you poke its eye with with a needle it won’t go entirely blind on that eye like we do. It still have many other units which will play the active role. It has an excellent color vision and motion detection too. Many insects have this sort of vision, even the butterflies, but butterflies vision is usually obscured from behind by its own wings, that’s why you could catch it easily from behind, not from front.

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This is how it stations itself most of the time. It bears entire of its weight against gravity with those slender legs. It has such a strong limbs and extreme alertness at all times. Just imagine ourselves balancing on a pole horizontally just with our hands, you would know the amount of strength required comparatively. They are ready to spring at anytime without the lag and can take off instantaneously unlike our man-made drones. That has partly to do with with thrust from their legs and the wings that takes up immediately after the thrust.

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Focused on it’s prey, ready to spring like a panther. They are voracious, violent. I say that because lions who are considered as king of jungle have just 30% success rate in hunt, that’s like 2 in every 3 chases ends in failure. Sharks have 50% success rate in its hunt. As you go down the food chain the success rate decreases. Whereas the dragonflies have 93% success rates. When it lays its vision on an insect and decides it is going to be its food, there is only 7% chance that the insect will live to tell its tale of escape.

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I don’t know if this was a crossbreed between butterfly and dragonfly or if dragonflies do exist like this naturally. Its wings aren’t so fragile and slender as the ordinary ones and they also had rich patterns on it. I actually found this near a pond where both butterflies and dragonflies were flocking together. I don’t know which butterfly had to do the explanation to its partner.

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You may think this one went on diet and soaked its face in a pool of makeup stuffs and became an anorexic model. You are actually wrong. These are naturally occurring cute green-eyed dragonflies. They are more quick and active than the bigger ones. You may think, they are in focus, but the next moment, they would have disappeared. It is a quite difficult task to take a picture especially given their tiny size. The bigger ones flap their wings 30 times per second whereas with these, the flap rate is even more, but definitely lesser than bees which flap 300 times per second. The odds will be in your favor only when you guess a place with maximum probability of the dragonfly landing on it and focusing there in advance. That’s because according to its motion detecting sensor in its sight it would have deemed that you are a part of the environment and not a new predator.

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That place would either turn out to be its romantic spot or death bed or sometimes both. It usually lands there expecting its female partner would come there. Sometimes the female would, sometimes frogs would. Usually most of the time it senses the frog immediately and escapes, but there would be occasions where the frogs wins too, especially because they shoot their tongue at an extremely fast speed while leaping up at the same time.