Wow! An animal using its eyes to see, and mody to move?? Unfuckingbelievable.
Wow! An animal using its eyes to see, and mody to move?? Unfuckingbelievable.
They use vision to sense their orientation.
They use vision to sense their orientation.
I remember seeing a study that showed that dragonflies can fly and capture prey at any orientation in their three-dimensional environment using something like only 5 or 10 neurons. It's rather amazing when you think about it that only 5 or 10 neurons are enough to to move the information from their compound eyes to the wing muscles in a necessary way to intercept that insect at their legs.
It becomes somewhat easier to understand when you understand how a dragonflies wings actually work. You can think of their wings as wings that have two controls. Their pitch. And the speed of their flapping. The speed of their flapping is controlled by muscles you can consider like an electric motor that just flap irregardless and the only thing you do is change the speed. Then there are the pitch muscles which changed the orientation of the wings. So in order to get the full complexity of dragonfly you have four wings and two inputs to each wing therefore they are very few inputs that you need to control directly. Furthermore one neuron can actually control the ratio between two inputs so you don't even need the full eight inputs to do it. so that means you need less than eight neurons going to the necessary Wing muscles to completely control the flight of the dragonfly. From then it's just a matter of taking the input from compound eyes which already do the geometry of direction of light source and movement for and directly relating those proportional directional signals which are pre-computed by the compound eye into the neurons and feeding them directly to the muscles that control the flight.
With modern toy quadcopter drones we can see this in an even more simplified fashion since you have typically four motors rotating propellers of actually fixed pitch and they can achieve most orientations of flight simply by varying the wire that controls the speed of the motor at each of the four propellers. So they don't even need to control the pitch. And they can achieve incredible agility and incredible speeds. So basically a drone quadcopter only needs quote for neurons if you equate wires to neurons. What it would probably indicate though and I think studies have shown is that dragonflies actually can do more than a drone can do in terms of agility and in the speed and time necessary and certainly with greater efficiency.
I remember seeing a study that showed that dragonflies can fly and capture prey at any orientation in their three-dimensional environment using something like only 5 or 10 neurons. It's rather amazing when you think about it that only 5 or 10 neurons are enough to to move the information from their compound eyes to the wing muscles in a necessary way to intercept that insect at their legs.
It becomes somewhat easier to understand when you understand how a dragonflies wings actually work. You can think of their wings as wings that have two controls. Their pitch. And the speed of their flapping. The speed of their flapping is controlled by muscles you can consider like an electric motor that just flap irregardless and the only thing you do is change the speed. Then there are the pitch muscles which changed the orientation of the wings. So in order to get the full complexity of dragonfly you have four wings and two inputs to each wing therefore they are very few inputs that you need to control directly. Furthermore one neuron can actually control the ratio between two inputs so you don't even need the full eight inputs to do it. so that means you need less than eight neurons going to the necessary Wing muscles to completely control the flight of the dragonfly. From then it's just a matter of taking the input from compound eyes which already do the geometry of direction of light source and movement for and directly relating those proportional directional signals which are pre-computed by the compound eye into the neurons and feeding them directly to the muscles that control the flight.
With modern toy quadcopter drones we can see this in an even more simplified fashion since you have typically four motors rotating propellers of actually fixed pitch and they can achieve most orientations of flight simply by varying the wire that controls the speed of the motor at each of the four propellers. So they don't even need to control the pitch. And they can achieve incredible agility and incredible speeds. So basically a drone quadcopter only needs quote for neurons if you equate wires to neurons. What it would probably indicate though and I think studies have shown is that dragonflies actually can do more than a drone can do in terms of agility and in the speed and time necessary and certainly with greater efficiency.
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