Darners, and dragonflies in general, are perfectly built to hunt at both stages of their life cycle: the aquatic naiad and the aerial adult. The naiad is brown in order to blend in with the silt on the floor of the slow-moving rivers and ponds that make up its habitat and has hairs designed to pick up the aforementioned silt for the purpose of camouflage. Darners, at every stage of life, are ambush hunters so naiads wait for prey to come close. Unlike most insects, dragonfly naiads can catch their prey from a distance with extendable labial palps which latch onto prey. Darners’ have sharp hooks at the ends which close around prey, which makes them even more deadly. Naiads are such well adapted hunters that they have been known to catch and kill frogs.

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Their process of becoming winged, flying creatures begins internally. Dragonflies go through what is called incomplete metamorphosis, where the dragonfly’s new body is grown inside the body of the naiad, who molts repeatedly to accommodate its ever-increasing size. Because of this, dragonflies are, at all times, hunters, not having a time to relax, unlike insects who go through complete metamorphosis like the Butterfly and Moth, among others.

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When a naiad is ready to complete its metamorphosis, it affixes itself to a blade of grass and its skin splits open, revealing the green body of the adult Green Darner, possibly named for the bright green color of the adults’ heads and thoraxes. Newly hatched dragonflies, called tenerals, don’t start with the same vivid colors of fully-grown adults but become more pigmented as they continue to mature.

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Almost immediately, they use their incredible adaptations for their hunting, catching up to 95% of prey they pursue! Their eyes are the first of these adaptations, with around 30,000 ommatidia (or simple eyes) providing dragonflies an almost 360 degree view of their surroundings. Darners’ eyes are larger and provide even better visibility from all sides than those of many other species. They are also more specialized than those of humans, who have only 3 opsins, parts of the eye that can see colors, which see red, green, and blue. Dragonflies have 11 varieties of opsion, allowing them to see both UV and polarized light, something humans definitely can’t do.

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The wings are also quite important. The muscle for a dragonfly’s wings makes up up to 60% of the mass of a dragonfly. This mass is not wasted. Libellulid dragonflies have been measured traveling at speeds of 9 miles per hour, or 80 body lengths per second. This may not seem like much but if a human were to move at 80 body lengths (in this case the average human height) per second, they would reach speeds of around 300 miles per hour. However, this is nothing compared to the purported flight speeds of Aeshnids (another word for Darners), who are said to be able to fly at speeds of 34 miles per hour. A human traveling that fast, proportionately, would reach more than 1600 miles per hour!

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They also possess the unique ability to track the motion of their quarry and use it to plan an intercept course. This was, until recently, believed to be a complex calculation only possible in the brains of vertebrates. Dragonflies line themselves up with their prey so as to keep their heading from their prey constant in a behavior known as motion tracking. This means that the dragonfly’s image gets larger and larger in the view of their prey without them appearing to move, the camouflage in motion camouflage.

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Truly, the hunting nature of the Darner, as well as dragonflies in general, sets them apart in the insect kingdom. They are unmatched in terms of flight capability and hunting success, attributes that make them very interesting to study. Seeing just the specimen as just a sterile, lifeless thing in a museum masks their ferocity, which is revealed upon research.