Pick a random azimuth you want to go. Keep walking while having sun always at the same position and you'll be walking in the straight line.<p>Pick random azimuth you want to go. Keep walking while having street lamp always at the same position and half of you will be spiraling away from the lamp, and the other half will be spiraling towards the lamp forever.
That was a great read. I particularly liked that the dorsal orientation was strong enough that a light below the insect would invert it, even if that meant making it crash. I'm going to build an immersible lamp that I can put into a bucket with a layer of oil on the top (viscous fluid) so that the lamp is just below the surface of the oil. Based on the reasoning of this paper, it should result in flying insects inverting and doing a dive into the oil to their demise.
i worked in geneva, switzerland for about 6 months, and in the summer literally every streetlight was surrounded by masses of spider webs - they had worked out that this was where small flying creatures were to be found. strangely, i've never seen this anywhere else, at least not in such profusion.
This is very interesting and certainly clears up a long held childhood notion that all insects are attracted to the moon (?) makes no sense, but glad to see research on this.
Wonder if that explains partially the Windshield Phenomenon. Random lamps attacting flying insects kilometers away just to die surely helps decrease their numbers. See <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon</a>
I once was on am outdoors film set where we used 1.5 kW HMIs from Arri to light a night scene. One of the Arris was a bit beaten up and after a while we saw smoke rise from the lamp. Of course we shut the thing off and went to investigate.<p>Turns out the UV filter of the lamp had a slight gap on one side, a reasonably sized pile of insects had gathered there and started burning in the heat. It must have had something to do with the UV because they were really just gathering in that one spot and all other lamps were more or less insect-free.
Wonder how many smaller bugs went extinct because of artificial lights. Humans activity does quite some damage just out of sheer ignorance and neglect. We need exclusive non-human zones on this planet.
Coming home one night, I approached the front door and found hundreds of earthworms crawling up the wall toward the artificial light. Some close to it were sort of tapping on the light. This was before ubiquitous cameras or else I'd have a picture. I haven't found info on this phenomenon anywhere, and this article doesn't offer any explanation of that. I'd like to recreate this, but it might have just been under the most perfect conditions.
So an ideal bug zapper would have a central light & the zappers coming "out" at 90 degree angle like rocket fins.<p>Guess I should patent this.
So…<p>Why do bugs bash into lights?
Because they think they’re the sky.<p>That seems to be the simplest, most down-to-earth and in-touch with instinct interpretation I can think up for this. The only confusions resting on the word “think.”
Ok so basically insects are trying to get escape velocity from the light source but their DNA makes them really maintain their back from the light, going in circles for ever
interesting that we are given a glib explanation for this phenomenon at school that doesn't quite make sense, and this finesses it nicely. In similar vein, the simple explanation of why images are inverted in mirrors falls foul of a little probing - e.g why in that case do we not appear upside-down?; there are some good deeper dives into this one on YouTube.
Me living in the DFW area:<p>This is great! I can open my window at night and feel the cool air blow in and never have to worry about mosquitos.<p>Also me living in the DFW area:<p>I opened my window 5 minutes ago and now I have a hundred crane flies in my office because my light is on.<p>Of course, this is all due to the window not having a screen due to my dog.
Very cool read. Now when my kids ask me why bugs are attracted to lights, I can tell them the lights act as adversarial misinformation injected into bugs' onboard GNC systems.