Do Dragonflies have antennae (feelers)?
Yes, Dragonflies do have a pair of antennae. They are very tiny and difficult to see. If you look at the photo you will just be able to see the antennae between the front of the eye and the front of the face of this Emperor dragonfly. As dragonflies rely much more on their eyesight than on a sense of touch or smell, they do not need the large antennae found on some beetles and moths.
To hunt other flying insects, dragonflies rely on their excellent vision and superb flight skills. Their other senses are poor. Dragonflies, and many other kinds of insects, have no sense of hearing. The antennae of many insects are large and packed with chemical receptors giving them superb senses of smell, taste and touch, but a dragonfly’s antennae are small and their main function is to measure air speed in flight.
The compound eyes of a dragonfly are huge compared with the size of its head. (If you were a dragonfly, your eyes would be the size of a football helmet!) Each eye is made up of 30,000 telescope-shaped ommatidia (singular = ommatidium). Each one collects light from the direction it points, and the brain processes this to make a nearly 360 degree field of view.
Compound eyes cannot change focus, like human eyes, so only objects that are close to the dragonfly appear in clear detail. A dragonfly doesn’t see as much detail as a human can, but its eyes and brain are extremely sensitive to motion. They can detect movements separated by 1/300th of a second! To a dragonfly, a movie might look like a series of still pictures.
Dragonflies have binocular vision, so they can judge distances. They have colour vision, but see from orange to ultraviolet (UV) light. Insects don’t see red light, while we humans can’t see UV light. An object that reflects UV can appear quite different to an insect than it would to our eyes. Dragonflies also sense light polarization. Sunlight scattering in the atmosphere or reflecting off water becomes polarized. That means, instead of being randomly aligned, the light waves tend to line up. This creates patterns in the sky that show directions, and makes water surfaces highly visible.
Do Dragonflies have antennae (feelers)?
Yes, dragonflies have short antennae. This picture shows them arising between the large and widely separated compound eyes. The antennae on this species are bristle like and lie anterior to a tuft of hairs.
Yes, Dragonflies do have a pair of antennae. They are very tiny and difficult to see. If you look at the photo on the right you will just be able to see the antennae between the front of the eye and the front of the face of this Emperor dragonfly. As dragonflies rely much more on their eyesight than on a sense of touch or smell, they do not need the large antennae found on some beetles and moths.
They are the thin strands sticking up right in front of the eyes.
Dragonflies are mainly visual hunters, and so are not as dependent on their antennae as some other insects are.
