Dragonflies have incredible comp0und eyes that can process up to 300 distinct images per second. That’s six times more than a human being can process. PHOTO: Vecteezy
Credits:
Music: all compositions © J Cave Buckner 2026
All photos: Vecteezy unless specified
Carboniferous dragonflies, Mark Garlick, Science Source, “Meganeuropsis permina, the largest insect ever documented.”
OPEN:
Say! Here’s somethin’ I’ll bet you didn’t know. Are you sittin’ down?
Predators in nature’s food chain aren’t that successful in catching their prey on the first try. Now—I don’t know what your day has been like; but you can take heart, knowing that if you find yourself being chased by an apex predator, they miss their intended target about 75% of the time. I’m assuming you’re quick thinking, agile and can outrun everyone else who may be with you.
Hey, I’m Cave Buckner, your host for The Southern Minute Podcast. This is good news it wasn’t 300 million years ago. And really? We’ve only been around about 300,000 years. But there was a time, during the over oxygenated Carboniferous Period, when you might have been chased by a predator that may have had a 95% capture rate on the first try. It had a wingspan of 2.5 feet (.76 meters) and weighed about 2 lbs. or 1 kilo, so it might have had to hunt in groups, such as the wild Australian dog, to be evolutionarily successful. But I said “wingspan,” which tells you this is a flying entity. I’m talking about a pre-Jurassic dragonfly, known as the “Meganeura.”
Meganeuropsis permina, the largest insect ever documented, had a 2 1/2 foot wingspan. PHOTO: , Mark Garlick, Science Source
But I tell you this only to give you some upfront evolutionary knowledge about dragonflies. They shrunk in size over time and one theory has to do with the lowered amount of oxygen in our atmosphere over time. Today, dragonflies are highly evolved, complex insects, but I only have time to hit the highlights, some of the reasons why much smaller dragonflies today are still formidable predators, though unlike mosquitoes have no need to prey on human beings. In short, they have superior eyesight, amazingly speedy acrobatic flight ability, they have powerful serrated mouthpart mandibles that can slice and dice exoskeletons and flesh with ease, and their six powerful spined legs form a basket shape to trap and hold prey.
They have also evolved with what is called “structural coloration,” a play on light reflection, used for adaptive camouflage to confuse their predators, when they become the prey. Even though dragonflies are swarming this time of year to feed on evening hatches of prey insects, some species are also like many songbirds, getting ready to migrate south to warmer climes. Not all dragonflies migrate, but a very common one, such as the green darner—one of 3,000 known species, has already started migrating through and from Missouri, headed for the Gulf.
Aside from other incredible evolutionary adaptations, I wanted to address their eyesight, as well as their friendly nature, because it is through eyes (and ears) that we receive our communication signals in order to react in a fight or flight response, or to probe through curiosity. Nobody will tell me that living creatures lack a sense of curiosity.
As a former wildlife biologist, these days, I am a Southern gothic fiction writer. Having completed a historical fiction thriller that involves a true story about the US War Department editing subliminal messaging into silent movies to sway American sentiment to join our allies in World War I.
I also learned about a natural phenomenon called “flicker fusion.” It’s the speed at which a flickering light—light that appears through our eyes as on and off in rapid succession, to reach a speed of flicker so that it becomes steady light, with no flicker. Human beings have a flicker fusion frequency of 60 hertz, or 60 flickers per second, which means a movie or monitor screen, with the aid of light, reaches a speed that projects images, so we see only a smooth continuous motion from individual snapshots. In movies, that’s a speed of about 24 frames per second.
A dragonfly’s flicker fusion frequency is around 300 hertz, or six times faster than humans. They process visual information at an incredible speed. What does that mean to the sight of a dragonfly?
If a dragonfly were watching an outdoor movie projected on the side of a building, it would look like watching a projector slide show, seeing each projected individual picture on a film reel like an individual slide, one-by-one. If I tried to catch a dragonfly by hand, it would appear to the dragonfly in slow motion, easily able to escape the grasp. Their rapid sight processing allows them to track fast moving predators or prey and dodge obstacles in mid-air with inhuman accuracy. By comparison, a housefly is hard to kill because their flicker fusion frequency is 250 to 270 per second, or four times faster than human beings. It sees your hand moving in slow motion, but misjudges the reach of a flyswatter, though in slow motion.
In the second historical fiction novel I’m currently writing in the Cinema Man series, a 10-year-old orphaned Gullah-Geechee boy from the Georgia coast is having a conversation with a dragonfly, as it sits on his finger. How many of you have done the same? I know I have.
You don’t have to say anything. You just sort of enjoy each other’s company and possibly telepathically, say howdy and observe one another, bonding as fellow travelers hurtling through space. This is called inter-species communication, such as you may have with your pets who seem to know your thoughts beyond commands if you’re a dog owner or shared frustration and disdain at times, if you’re into cats.
This book scene is built around a concept that inter-species communication could be construed to be the same as communication between the black and white races in the Deep South in the 1920s—with initial greetings, a polite social dance, the observation of differences, the guarded conversation and the search for similarities, culminating into a possible recognition of a brotherhood of sorts, if only for a moment in time.
Like bottlenose dolphins, the dragonfly is one species from nature that appears to want to communicate with its earth mate. I have a link to a video and blog post on the podcast webpage, called “Conversation with a Dragonfly,” from author and animal communicator Babette De Jongh, who grew up in or near Alabama. When a dragonfly wants to commune with her, she uses a technique called the “step-up,” to encourage inter-species communication to build a trust bond and has also been successful using this method with birds.
She says, “If you’ve ever communicated with a dragonfly, you’ll have noticed that dragonfly’s brains don’t whirl as fast as ours do. So, when a dragonfly decides to perch on your finger, it’s perfectly fine if you decide not to talk at all, but to try instead to calm your thoughts and lower your energy so the dragonfly feels comfortable communing with you.”
Without giving the story away, the protagonist, Wheat Ballentine, becomes aware of the power of “flicker fusion,”—which he calls “real John Carter stuff,” who was the Confederate veteran who went to Mars and had superpowers, in the book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who also wrote Tarzan at that time. It’s physics and physiology pertaining to eyesight and the perception of moving objects, whether they be the moving pictures on a screen or how we and all of God’s creatures perceive movement through eyesight, which of course, involves light and will determine a species survival.
I’ll close with a research observation about flicker fusion, from Dr Clinton Haarlem, from Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience.
“Understanding how animals perceive time, (many co-existing with different time perceptions) helps us understand how they behave, evolve, and respond to environmental change—and here’s the “whoa (!) moment” . . . . It reminds us that the world we experience is just one version of many.”
I’m your host Cave Buckner, and you’ve been listening to The Southern Minute. Go make friends with a migrating dragonfly—and wish it well on its Southern journey, unless of course, you’re already at the Gulf.
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LINKS:
How to Train Your Dragonfly: Use the “Step-Up” maneuver like training a bird.
Babette De Jongh
Video: The Insane Biology of the Dragonfly
Real Science