Insects & others · plate 58 of 60
Dragonfly
Anisoptera
Ninety-five percent success rate. Zero follow-up.
Only 2.2% of people are Dragonflies. (estimated)
If you're a Dragonfly
You are fast, precise and almost never miss, and you move on before anyone has processed what happened. You hunt alone, you hold a territory, and you cover distances that make other travelers look sedentary. Underneath the speed is a long apprenticeship nobody saw: years underwater before a few weeks in the air. You don't dwell on it.
Dragonflies catch roughly 95 percent of the prey they go after, one of the highest hunting success rates recorded in any animal.
The Dragonfly as a spirit animal
You are quick, independent and exact, which makes you superb at the task and absent from the aftermath. You carry no baggage because nothing stays in reach long enough to become baggage. The flaw is that a life lived at this speed has no room for anyone keeping up, and you have stopped checking whether anyone is. A dragonfly's adult life is a few weeks. It spends none of them explaining itself.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Dragonfly
Do
- Be where they are hunting; they won't come to you.
- Keep it short; they measure patience in wingbeats.
- Respect the territory, usually a stretch of pond they patrol all day.
Don't
- Don't ask them to slow down for a group photo.
- Don't mistake the hovering for indecision; it's targeting.
When it goes wrong: A dragonfly under pressure simply leaves at speed; don't chase, wait at the pond, and it will patrol back past you.
The Dragonfly in a relationship
You love in the air, briefly and acrobatically, and you are gone before the dew is off the grass. You are fiercely attentive while it lasts, guarding your partner from all comers, and then the season moves and so do you. You have never once been accused of lingering.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 1
- Boldness
- 7
- Energy
- 9
- Curiosity
- 5
- Devotion
- 0
- Roaming
- 8
- Each of the four wings moves independently, so a dragonfly can hover, fly backward and turn in place.
- It spends most of its life underwater as a nymph, breathing through gills in its rear end and jetting about by squirting water.
- One species, the globe skimmer, migrates across the Indian Ocean, the longest journey known for any insect.
Dragonflies in literature
- The Dragonfly — The Dragonfly and the Ant, Ivan Krylov (1808)
- The dragonfly — The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley (1863)
- The dragon-fly — The Two Voices, Alfred Tennyson (1842)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Dragonfly's. If you got Dragonfly, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other insects & others
Among the 60
Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, Bibliographisches Institut (1889). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
