"They're amazing fliers," explains Combes. "That particular maneuver takes only a half second to happen," adds Iwasaki. She points to one of the high-speed images: "This one is missing about half of its left front wing and yet, it still does an amazing job catching the fruit fly in midair." "They'll go up in midair, catch the prey with their feet, turn upside down and glide back to the stick, and the whole capture will take maybe a second, or a second and a half," says Combes. The high-speed cameras catch what the human eye can't.
They release a dragonfly along with some tasty fruit fly prey to see what happens next. In the enclosure, her team has set up eight high-speed cameras.
If they're not in a large enough space where they're comfortable, they'll just starve because they only will eat this prey in midair," explains Combes. One of the problems with studying dragonflies is they tend to not go after prey if the lighting is not just right. "We built this especially to look at predation in dragonflies. It's large, about one and a half stories high. The team takes two dragonflies back to a specially built, netted enclosure. You can tell this species in particular from the white dots on its wings." "It's in the family of Libellulidae, which are dragonflies known as skimmers this is a male. "It's a Libellula cyanea," he notes when he finally catches one. I lost it," exclaims team member and biomechanist Jay Iwasaki. On this outing, they hope to net a few to study. The researchers have already identified 20 species at the pond so far. "We're surrounded by woods and ponds, which is an ideal habitat to find dragonflies." This is a field station of Harvard University about a half-hour from the main campus," says Combes. "Our lab is at the Concord Field Station in Bedford, Mass. She set up her lab in typical "dragonfly country." With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), she and her team are studying how dragonflies pull off complicated aerial feats that include hunting and mating in mid-air.