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's Natalie Angier.

Not to salt too hard on Angier or the Gray 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 biomimicked 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, timely analogy. Too bad it hits far off the mark. If anything, the only prevailing link between these winged insects and, say, the Predator drone, 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 honeybee that can neither sting nor make honey and whose sole purpose is reproduction.

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

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.