Lions are famously good hunters, but they actually fail far more than they succeed - only about 1 in 4 hunts ends in a meal. Great white sharks do worse than that. The deadliest hunter on Earth, gram for gram, isn’t a big toothy predator. It’s the dragonfly.
In experiments, dragonflies catch the mosquitoes and gnats they hunt 90 to 95 percent of the time. The secret is in their eyes - huge wraparound balls of about 30,000 separate lenses each, giving them almost 360-degree vision. They can see in front of them, behind them, above and below, all at once.
Their brains are wired to predict exactly where their prey will be a fraction of a second from now and to fly directly to that spot, not to where the prey is. They’re basically tiny flying anti-aircraft systems - and they’ve been doing it for about 325 million years, longer than dinosaurs.
