Dragonflies Are Really Good Hunters, Not Drones

The problem--or is it the upside?--with the word "drone" is that it's taking on a seemingly infinite number of definitions. The irony is that even though the majority of these definitions don't have shit to do with the hunter-killer aerial robots that traverse the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, snuffing out suspected bad guys, for most of the public "drone" still means one thing, and one thing only: an unmanned, remotely piloted, weaponized flying thing. Just ask the New York Times' Natalie Angier.

Not to salt too hard on Angier or the Grey Lady, or anything. Angier's recent and fascinating piece on dragonflies titled "Nature's Drone, Pretty and Deadly," is a must read.

But here's the thing. When you spend an entire feature chronicling the shockingly higher-level processes by which dragonflies stalk and eat prey--and fuck mates--all in the service of highlighting some bio-mimicked link between killer insects and killer robots, you have to be sure enough similarities even exist to support that correlation. (You should also maybe be sure that the body of said feature employs the D-word more than once? I don't know. Just a thought.)

Nevertheless: Dragonflies are drones! It's a cute, if timely analogy. Too bad it hits far off the mark. If anything, the only prevailing link between these winged insects and, say, the Predator, is the word "predator." Here's why.

Let's start from the top. Saying the modern dragonfly is "nature's drone" is like saying the modern great white shark is "nature's Jaws." It's as unnecessary and borderline redundant as it is misleading. Why? Nature already has a drone, and it's called--wait for it--the drone. By this I mean a male honey bee that can neither sting nor make honey, and whose sole purpose is reproduction.

In the purest sense, then, "drones" are lazy and non-lethal. To hear Angier tell it, dragonflies aren't any of those things.

Angier takes pains to plot all the ins and outs of the insect's shockingly precise and downright brutal hunting chops. "Dragonflies are magnificent aerialists," she writes, "able to hover, dive, fly backward and upside down" and almost effortlessly pivot 360-degrees on course for food and mates. It's this sort of beeline (sorry) interception that Rober M. Olberg, a dragonfly researcher at Union College, tells Angier is something of an "old mariner's trick." Angier explains:

If you’re heading north on a boat and you see another boat moving, say, 30 degrees to your right, and if as the two of you barrel forward the other boat remains at that 30-degree spot in your field of view, vector mechanics dictate that your boats will crash: better slow down, speed up or turn aside.

In aviation speak, that's called "sense and avoid." It's a human pilot's evolutionary ability to realize when something (another plane, a "drone") is careening too close for comfort, and to then get the hell out of the way, to change course, and quick. "Drones" don't yet have that awareness. This is proving to be one of the bigger roadblocks to not only ensuring that hulking Predators and Reapers don't collide with commercial and passenger airliners, but in integrating smaller, so-called civilian drones into domestic airspace in the run-up to NextGen Airspace.

Fact: We will never (ever, ever) know exactly how many people have been knocked out by Hellfire missiles launched from American drones in the shadow wars. But we can speculate. And for all we know, "drones" are--and have been--tragically imprecise in targeting folks for death. To the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's count, of the roughly 2,537-3,581 people killed in the 366 drone strikes between 2004 and 2013 in Pakistan alone, anywhere between 440 and 884 were innocent civilians. Hardly precise.

Dragonflies, on the other hand, are apparently the Robin Hoods of the arthropods. Dragonflies are so good, Angier reports, that they manage to pick off targets in midair an astonishing 95 percent of the time.

In other words, it's a fool's errand--if not quite crass--to try and equate the accuracy of "nature's drone" to that of counterterror's drones.

Again, this is not to rag on Angier. She does hit one similarity on the head. For creatures only boasting 1 million brain neurons, dragonflies have impeccable vision. Much like humans (which have about 100 billion brain neurons) are able to focus in on a specific target at a party, tuning out everything else, so too can dragonflies single out targets. I can't help but call to mind the coming Gorgon Stare drone-imaging technology when I hear that dragonfly eyes are "each built of 30,000 pixel-like facets" that taken together account for pretty much the 'lil bugger's entire head.

Still, this isn't enough to support Angier's (well-researched!) analogy. And that's a buzzkill.

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone