Researchers from Australia and Sweden have shown how a dragonfly's brain anticipates the movement of its prey, enabling it to hunt successfully. This knowledge could lead to innovations in fields such as robot vision and autonomous vehicles.

Research has largely focused on the capabilities of mammals, such as humans, to investigate how animals can predict where a moving object will be in the near future. But dragonflies have visual and neural processes that could be useful.

The Swedish-Australian collaboration resulted in the discovery of brain cells (neurons) in the dragonfly Hemicordulia that enables them to predictively pursue and catch their flying prey. These neurons make it possible to focus on a small object that moves over a complex background. They say it is similar to how humans can track and catch a ball, even when that ball is moving against a complex background.

Professor David O'Carroll, professor of biology at Lund University, said "The dragonfly neurons can make a selection of a single target from the mass of visual information that the brain receives, such as the motion of another insect, and then predict its direction and future location. The dragonfly, like humans, makes this assessment based on the path along which the object moves."

In other words, the dragonfly does something similar to what humans do when tracking a ball in motion.

University of Adelaide PhD student Joseph Fabian and other team members were able to record target-detecting neurons in the dragonfly brain. These neurons increased their responses in a small "focus" area just in front of the location of a moving object being tracked. If the object then disappeared from the field of vision, the focus spread forward over time, allowing the brain to predict where the target was most likely to reappear. The neuronal prediction was based on the previous path along which the prey had flown.