Emperor dragonfly
Anax imperator
— Where the name comes from
Anax is the Greek for “lord, sovereign”, Agamemnon’s Homeric title; imperator is the Latin for commander. King twice over. The Italian word libellula comes instead from the Latin libella, the builders’ level, for the perfectly horizontal flight.
— Facts
- Group
- Insects · Insecta
- Order
- Dragonflies
- Habitat
- Ponds, lakes, vegetated canals
- Range
- Europe, Africa, western Asia
- Size
- 7–8 cm of body, 10 cm wingspan
- Diet
- Carnivore — insects caught on the wing
- Lifespan
- 2 years as an aquatic nymph, a few weeks as an adult
— Characteristics
- 01
The compound eye has nearly 30,000 facets.
- 02
The four wings move independently: it flies backwards and hangs still in the air.
- 03
The aquatic nymph hunts with an extensible lower lip that shoots out.
— What sets it apart
The dragonfly catches its prey in flight nine times out of ten — a success rate no large predator comes near. It does not chase: it calculates. A small group of neurons projects the target’s future path and steers the flight to the interception point, correcting within milliseconds. This is predictive interception, the logic of a guided missile, run by a brain the size of a grain of rice.
