Dragonfly's extreme loop-the-loops
(science.org)131 points by pseudolus 5 days ago
131 points by pseudolus 5 days ago
Sounds about right, 1 million neurons and potentially 1 billion synapses. Back in school I used to think computers and machines were so advanced and complex compared to boring old biology. It was such a silly misconception to be so many orders of magnitude off in complexity.
I guess we're still not out of the 'flying into a window' stage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition
Producing complex behavior simply is usually harder and more elegant than using a lot of superfluous complexity.
I feel pretty confident saying it is not following a simpler pattern. It is doing something very hard, with far less training data and a much more alien form of compute (which is also much slower in general than computers).
Is there some elegant learning algorithm in nature that enables this? Maybe. But I don’t think there’s any simplification of the task, that nature has found. For example, I doubt we will find a 100 line algorithm to do the motion the dragonfly did, or a simple physics equation to describe it etc. My intuition, stems from the bitter lesson, a lot of these tasks are irreducibly complex and trying to find elegant simple models, tends to be a waste of time.
Although bugs can still have a 'what the F was that?' reaction, per the classic 'catapulting tiny pies at flying insects' video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6nshKhqyqU (Millimetres Matter)
I watched this cool video recently on dragonfly movement. Dragonflies Hunt by Predicting the Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i9WMD6xbuA
In the summer, one of my "hobby" is just to sit in my backyard and watch a couple of dragonflies circles around, swoop down and catch flies/mosquitoes. They have a way to fly close, rendezvous with the targets and then just swoop down in all of a sudden to kill them. Fascinating animal! I could sit there and watch them in constant state of awe.
Dragonflies are freakin' awesome. By far my favorite insect.
Not only are they incredible acrobats but they can eat up to a hundred mosquitos (my least favorite insect) per day with a hunting success rate of 95%.
The ancestors of dragonflies and damselflies have been the first insects that have evolved to fly well, not just to fly.
The other insects that are good fliers, e.g. flies, wasps, bees, certain moths, have evolved towards better flying in a completely different way from dragonflies, and many tens of millions of years later.
The ancestors of dragonflies have developed special muscles that can move separately and accurately each of the 4 wings, allowing exquisite flight control.
All the other good fliers among insects use only the equivalent of two wings, either by reducing one pair of wings, like in flies, or by having a mechanical linkage between the front and back wings, which makes them act like a single pair of wings, like in wasps, bees and fast-flying moths.
Moreover, the other good fliers among insects, unlike dragonflies, do not move directly the wings, but their flying muscles are attached to the thorax and contract it for moving the wings. A system of levers transmits the movement of the thorax to the wings. This also allows the wings to beat at a higher frequency than the frequency at which the nervous system can command the muscular contractions.
Their larvae are also pretty brutal predators and they also feed on mosquito larvae. Here's a YT vid showing how they hunt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHo_9wnnUTE
Damselflies deserve a bit of attention too.
Random video https://youtube.com/shorts/-ALXaGRl_g8
Bat houses can take 5 years before bats will decide to live in them - they won't just settle in some strange box because they found it. This lag time makes it very difficult to determine if the bats will like your box, but just need more time - or if there is some aspect about the placement or location of the box that means they will never take up residence in it.
The Internet is your friend. See eg https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonfly/comments/10z03h6/how_to_a...
This looks like one of the first usages of the phrase "absolutely insane" on science.org.
Found a second usage.
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-oil-plume-change...
Nice, I suppose I didn't look hard enough.
(1999)
https://www.science.org/content/article/partners-science-par...
Still a rare event, and the first usage in a headline.
> That was a big surprise to Christofer Brothers, who studies dragonflies and damselflies at UC Davis. “Before this talk, I was under the impression they avoided contact with the water outside of females laying their eggs.”
Not to throw any shade, but this sounds... weird? I mean, missing that they do something you can only see with a high speed camera? OK. But missing that they dip into the water? Would you not at least have watched them for a couple hours if you are "studying" them? At a university?
Oh, I study data structures but I've never measured the access time of a HashMap. Am I being too harsh?
Yes. The behavior in question is not easy to observe.
> About once every 10 minutes, a dragonfly dunks its body in the water
... and you see the water splashing in the video, with the ripples being visible for a bit.
Again, I was not talking about the rotations, just the dragonflies touching/immersing in the water. I just find it incredible no one watched them for 20 minutes at a time apparently?
Given that it is utterly obvious that “no one watched them for 20 minutes at a time” is false, you should accept that this is not as simple as you imagine as a naive layman.
You may well be curious why it wasn’t noticed sooner, but no specialist will inform you when your approach to them is “So, are you just an idiot compared to me, a random nobody who has thought about your field for all of two minutes?” ;)
It might just be because they have to die somehow. Probably 1 in 4 humans' hearts eventually stop working too.
Selection is a balance. It is hard to judge what is being selected for when you only look at one factor (drowning).
Aging versus cancer is an example of balance: one theory is that age related diseases are a side effect of selection forces against cancer: programmed cell death after X reproductions (telomeres) are a general anti-cancer defence but the cell-death has aging effects. Also beware that selection is for successful reproduction: death after reproduction is not so relevant to evolution.
To see the presentation abstracts, at least, go here:
https://www.xcdsystem.com/sicb/program/fZq6Sh8/index.cfm?pgi...
... click on Search/Filter Program, then search for 'dragonfly'. Note that the results for each day are on separate tabs. The OP research is in at least two presentations.
I don't see a way to link directly to the search results or the presentation pages, which appear in some sort of popup.
If we wanted to make a drone have the intelligence of a dragonfly (which might still be a decade away), we would at least need a billion parameters and a trillion tokens in training data. Just helps us appreciate what nature is capable of.