In a pursuit, a predator points itself at the prey and follows. In an interception, it flies a course that keeps the prey's line of sight at a constant angle, so both animals arrive at the same point at the same time. High-speed filming of hunting dragonflies shows the second pattern: the target stays fixed on the same part of the eye while the gap shrinks.
The hardware supports it. A large dragonfly's compound eyes carry on the order of tens of thousands of ommatidia, with the upward-looking dorsal region most acute, so prey silhouetted against the sky is resolved best. Specialised target-detecting neurons respond selectively to small moving objects, and the four independently driven wings allow rapid attitude corrections. Capture rates reported for aerial hawking dragonflies commonly exceed ninety per cent in favourable conditions.
The open question is how much of the flight is steered by continuous visual feedback and how much by an internal model that predicts where the prey will be during moments when the dragonfly's own body movement blurs the image.