Pick Your Player: Dragonfly vs Damselfly | KQED

"Dragonflies rocket across the upper strata of the pondscape, reaching speeds of up to 30 miles an hour. Their four wings move independently, so they can switch between two flight modes: out of sync for lift and twists, or nearly in sync for bursts of speed. Even when they touch down, they keep their wings outstretched, ready to go. Damselflies sit and wait with wings folded neatly along their backs, on the lookout for prey."

"They need to be nimble, maneuvering between the shoots and stems crowding the airspace. Plants down here break up the airflow, creating swirling wind currents. Flying in that turbulence requires some serious control. To understand how damselflies pull this off, researchers at UC Berkeley put these graceful fliers in a wind tunnel and saw that, when they hit rough air, the damselflies maintain stability by quickly tweaking the flapping of their four wings."

"Both players have compound eyes made of a mosaic of thousands of tiny eye units. Their brains stitch the information together into one big, clear picture. Damselfly eyes are dichoptic: two separate eyes, like us. But these wide-set eyes give damselflies an ultra-panoramic view! From a perch, they lock in on their prey. Just like humans, their brains compare two slightly different images to calculate distance and depth. And boom-they snatch their prey with precision."

Dragonflies and damselflies use different flight and visual strategies adapted to their habitats. Dragonflies fly fast across open air, reaching up to 30 miles per hour, with four independently moving wings that switch between lift and speed modes. Damselflies perch with wings folded and take off into cluttered, turbulent vegetation, hovering and maneuvering among shoots and stems. Wind-tunnel experiments at UC Berkeley showed damselflies maintain stability in rough air by rapidly adjusting the flapping of their four wings. Damselflies have dichoptic, wide-set eyes for panoramic binocular depth perception; dragonflies have holoptic eyes giving near-360° motion detection and expert interception ability.

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