DRAGONFLIES shadow their enemies in complex manoeuvres that military fighter pilots can only dream of. Their tricks create the visual illusion that they鈥檙e not moving, says Akiko Mizutani at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Her team discovered this when they filmed confrontations between pairs of male dragonflies using two cameras. Then they reconstructed a dragonfly鈥檚 eye view of the shadowing male. In 6 out of 15 contests, the shadower appeared stationary to the other insect (Nature, vol 423, p 604).
This makes the insects hard to spot and may help in stealth attacks or escapes. It demands exquisite position sensing and flight control, adds Mizutani: 鈥淭his sort of performance is extremely hard for aircraft to achieve without very expensive and bulky measurement systems.鈥�
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