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.
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.
>>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.
Not quite. That's a good way to get lost in a hurry.
Let's pick North as our azimuth, right around sunrise in my location in New England. The sun is rising 77° to the right at 06:00, as I face North and start walking.
But the sun moves in the sky, so if I keep the sun 77° to the right of my nose as I walk, by 12:15, the sun is at 167°, and I am now walking due East...
I'll be walking in a curve following your guidance here, not a straight line, and the radius will depend on my walking/riding/sailing speed.
The same failure occurs for the Moon or any other astronomical object other than the polestar.
This is why the invention of portable accurate timepieces was so critical.
It works well enough over a reasonably short duration, it doesn't work very well near sunrise/sunset. During the middle part of the day (say 10a-2p) I can be confident that if I'm walking into my shadow that I'm heading approximately north--not perfect but good enough that for gross navigation I'm not going to bother to pull out my phone and look at the map. (I would never be out in the wilderness without *having* map/GPS/satellite texting/headlamp, but that doesn't mean I always *use* them.)
Of course, on a small enough area, short enough time, and rough enough goal, it's fine. The same applies to the earth being round or flat. I don't compensate for the curvature of the earth when figuring out area of bricks for a front walk, or building a shed. So what?
With your example, if I'm just trying to walk roughly north in the middle of the day and I know that my destination is just west of mountain slope that I'll see when I get near, then it'll work to just keep our shadows roughly in front of us. But, let's take finding a point on a functionally featureless plain or desert. It's 8 miles away, due North, so a bit over a two hour brisk walk. Local noon (w/DST) is 12:45, so we start at 11:45, and the sun's azimuth is 154°. By the time we get close-ish two hours later (say 7mi at 3.5mph), the sun's azimuth is 207°. So, we started out walking North, but we've been bending to the East, and are now off course by 53° to the East, and our average path is 26° off. After 2 hours at 3.5mph, we should be 1 mile away, due South, and set to arrive in 17 minutes more walking. Instead, we're 3.2 miles away from our objective, and walking 53° in the wrong direction.
The zone where this works is really pretty small, and we're probably using landmarks instead. And if you're trying to do this on water without compensating for the earth's rotation, you'll soon be in trouble...
It's not nearly that bad. You start heading too far east and bend back. After your two hours you are exactly on the right direction but have gone a bit farther than you needed to and are 26 degrees off course. I've never encountered any large, featureless terrain; rarely am I moving in a direction that's not either with the nature of the terrain or nearly directly across the terrain--it's easier to go a bit farther while minimizing the terrain fighting.
>> You start heading too far east and bend back.
>> rarely am I moving in a direction that's not either with the nature of the terrain or nearly directly across the terrain
Right, you are not ONLY following the sun's direction, you are compensating for it's motion over time, and using the terrain as a guide.
This is exactly my point: we cannot do what GP stated and use only the uncompensated sun's angle as a guide, save for very brief trips. And most of those we're also using landmarks to compensate.
The key finding of the research in this article is that this is not what is happening. See the "Flight path manipulation via light switching" section and the Discussion section.
I read this too and they went on to say the following.
Other mechanisms might contribute to the arrival of insects at nocturnal light sources over longer ranges. For instance, insects do use celestial compasses for nocturnal navigation, and artificial light sources may interfere with these heading
cues. But even at long distances artificial light sources often remain brighter than the night sky and may cause dorsal tilting that would also steer an insect towards a light source.
But I thought I interpreted their earlier point that this isn't the reason they're drawn the light.
I recently read a book which said that Moths use the moon for the navigation and artificial light throws off that process, becoming entrapped.
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.
There are these traps which are blue-light lamps that emit a small (for humans) amount of electricity, that is however enough to kill the small insects that are attracted to it.
On a summer night, you'll see it being full of insects after 1 hour of operation.
They're not kidding when they say full either. I'm in Western Canada and mosquitoes are essentially the unofficial national bird. They big, aggressive, and numerous. Literally handfuls of dead mozzies after running that thing for a few hours.
Is also why I started putting up bird feeders and nesting areas -- they control insects including the mosquitoes, and after seeing just how many were out there...
I think they're pretty high voltage / have a guard to stop humans touching the conductor?
We used to have them in a lab I worked in and occasionally a larger insect (e.g. wasp) would get caught between two rows of the grid and you'd hear it spark / them cook...
There's variants where the light is in a location that is hard for insects to exit. I've seen 1) fan causing airflow that's hard to "fly upstream" in 2) funnel shapes that make entry easy, but finding the exit hard. These avoid the zap aspect, and use less power (LED and maybe fan).
I've used those anti-insect yellow lights in all fittings outside my house for years and they dramatically reduce the number and type of all insects, including spiders, hanging about.
Two reasons, the first being to run an experiment whose result is predicted by the paper, in order to confirm the science in the paper.
The second being to mitigate the accumulation of insects around my campsite.
While it is true that insect populations world wide have been impacted by the commercial deployment of pesticides by large agricultural operations, it is not true that populations outside that particular affect are negatively affected. Insects, as a fauna, have an extraordinarily effective reproductive cycle relative to the natural hazards they encounter every day.
The most recent article about excess honeybee populations was a good example of how honeybees that are outside of the risk zone are not in any danger of becoming extinct but can and do displace important local pollinators.
A non-persistent local light trap is the ideal mitigation strategy for insects in a particular regions because it leaves no lasting footprint, doesn't contaminate the food chain, and has zero net impact on the overall population density of the insects.
I agree with the sentiment of not elevating selfish human desires over the health of an existing ecosystem. (But practically, there are many great ways to camp to minimize the habitat impact.)
But defining "the health" of an ecosystem is tricky. An invading invasive species is better adapted after all, and it is part of nature.
We need clearer understanding of what we mean by nature and what we are protecting.
* Are we just trying to hold on to some moment of time in a dynamic ecosystem? Maybe. Protecting the status quo might be practical in terms of human survival, but this doesn't feel like a moral invariant that some people hold it up to be.
* Are we protecting nature in proportion to its ability to feel pain? ... or sentience? ... over what perceptual time frame?
* Practically, so far, when enough people like or find value in certain aspects of nature, we may see some collective action.
As for me, I feel a deep connection with nature, and I recognize this most likely comes from us evolving alongside it. But I recognize my own bias; I care less about mosquitos than birds.
And as to "home territory", mosquitos don't seem to constrain themselves to their homes, whatever that might be. They multiply in little spots of water and go forth seeking blood. To oversimplify, I value human life more than mosquito life. Malaria is a terrible disease. Is this human-centric? Yeah. Do I want humans to continue to grow and destroy nature (whatever that means) as we have done so far? Not really, but I don't know how to practically slow population growth nor development in a way that people will go for. It is a collective will and action problem on a global scale.
Heck yeah we are. Also wherever your house is and whenever it was built theres a 100% chance it was built on a bugs house and theres definitely a haunted mass grave of insects under and around it.
yes, but there was proper notice given, and the planning permits were on display that construction was going to be occurring. there was plenty of time to relocate rather waking up one day and having the color yellow front of mind and needlessly laying down in front of the equipment.
At least the plans weren't on display It in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.”
> all the more reason - whatever the observed timeframe - for us humans to not behave like assholes towards insects and other life or nature in general.
But what about kudzo?
> Kudzu, a perennial vine native to Japan and China, was first introduced into the USA in 1876 and was actively promoted by the government as a “wonderplant", It expanded to cover over 1 million ha by 1946 and well over 2 million ha today. When Kudzu invades a forest, it prevents the growth of young hardwoods and kills off other plants. Kudzu causes damage to powerlines, and even overwhelms homes, Kudzu has invaded important protected areas, requiring significant investment of management resources, The management response to date outside the protected areas has been insufficient to deal with this very significant threat.
You talk as if the bug would have any respect for your house. Spoiler: they don't, bugs will literally eat your house to feed themselves (termites). I understand and support the concept that the existence of bugs is beneficial to us and so we should refrain from eliminating them, but there's nothing natural about the concept of respect for a bug's "house".
Good point and the whole idea of what is natural tends be anchored at some point in time, from some point of view. All too often, people use natural as a (unimpressive) rhetorical technique to justify some moral claim. Such claims fall apart when you (a) define nature at some other time or point of view; or (b) reject the notion that behavior we see in nature (in all its wonder, complexity, ruthlessness, and cruelty) should be the fundamental basis for human morality.
Is the OP killing them because s/he has no other alternative to feed himself/herself, or is it because of the annoyance even though s/he is in their habitat?
I don't think OP feeds on bugs, that's why mass killing of insects seems wrong. If it's a campsite it's less bad though than if it was a house where you could just turn down outside lights instead.
Here the science suggests that just having a light isn't an attractant. It just happens to confuse the bugs flying by. Statisically they would be no more likely to go to the neighbors site or yours. Of course it also suggests that if you surrounded your site with lights that it could create a "light shield" which would disrupt the flying pattern of any bug that was on a vector that passed by your site.
That suggests another interesting test which would be to use a bunch of rope lights to create a complete circle around your site to disrupt all bug flights going in or out of your area. Presumably it could create a higher density at the perimeter of disrupted bugs.
That's rather interesting. In late summer when I think there are lot of bugs in the grass, I would find if I had my headlamp with the default white light (even fairly dim) they tended hit my face more to my liking when walking in my backyard. But putting on the red LED almost none annoyed me.
Again, per the paper, the night sky is actually pretty luminous and nominally the bugs can still orient "up" with their top toward the night sky. If your red light was comparable to the illumination flux from the night sky you would see this effect.
It's probable that the psychological effect of having the light on is distorting how they perceive the insects hitting. I think the only scientific way to deal with this would be to make a bug spraying machine that can spray bugs at someone's face in different patterns. It may take a little time to find the right pattern, but when the subject thinks it matches what they experience with the headlamp they could say "Yes! Yes! That's the one!" (or they could just put their thumbs up and smile if they prefer not to open their mouth)
I recently bought a red headlamp for night hiking because I wanted to try something that wouldn't kill my night vision (under a good moon I prefer to hike without a light as using a light kills your night vision and thus your distance vision) but if it doesn't draw bugs that's an extra plus. At the borderline I usually avoid using my headlamp because the bugs it draws are annoying--when something flies a couple of inches from your face it's very bright!
Depends on the characteristics of the trap, the bait and the bug, doesn't it? A highly attractive trap with a steep drop-off, and large and effective kill zone, and a kind of bug with a small but active nightly migration radius (when near campers) (compared to the trap attraction radius) might quickly attract and kill all the bugs that will come into that radius that night.
When you kill all those bugs in the first hour of the night, does that leave a noticeable excess-food signal in the region where the dead bugs use to be?
I've been battling the Japanese Lady Beatles at my house every winter since we've moved in, and it's taught me so much about both of these things- and that most seo results about insect traps etc are entirely wrong about.
I haven't figured out the sweetspot for attractant trap placement yet. It's not inside or attached to your camp or house.
But I know that cold, dry, nonstressed deaths for those that do intrude minimizes the ultimate number that invade via that route. Don't heat them, including by cleaning then up with a standard vacuum.
Interesting facts (according to me): their smell that attracts others is one of those like asparagus, that only some people seem to sense.
But to me smells like burning peanut butter toast crossed with a kaolin/ clay.
Also they hate vibrations/ noise and will aggressively attack and bite in retaliation.
> run an experiment whose result is predicted by the paper, in order to confirm the science in the paper
Why would you do that ? I understand the science process but if you do this in an hardly reproductible environment (x setup in y location with z group of fauna), how can this confirm anything useful ?
> The second being to mitigate the accumulation of insects around my campsite.
Another reply recommend to use yellow light bulbs, that may also do the trick
> Insects, as a fauna, have an extraordinarily effective reproductive cycle relative to the natural hazards they encounter every day.
Sorry, these light traps you’re using are a natural phenomena the bugs have evolved to be effective against with breeding? Can you elaborate on that line of training?
This does recall my youth (in my country): when with my parents we were driving on highways, I recall clearly the insects crashing into the windshield which would have been to be cleanup after a few hours of driving.
This has not being happening anymore for a 2 decades...
The cars also improved aerodynamically. Modern cars designed to minimize the dead insect build up on the windshield. I suppose you're not driving the same old car for the past two decades?
You're getting a lot of strong reactions here, so I'll just stand up and say I agree with the point I think you're making, which is that the cavalier attitude some people have towards killing harmless insects is misplaced, especially when interactions can be mitigated easily. I'm not so sure it's as simple as turning lights off, though.
I do not hold the same opinion on disease carrying insects. They, regrettably, must be eliminated where people live. It's unclear which insects op is intending to kill. Around here such a campsite trap would net almost exclusively mosquitoes, which count as disease vectors to my eyes.
Regarding common disease vectors in insects, what is going on with ticks in the eastern US? 20 years ago I could go hiking in thousands of acres of pristine national forest and catch maybe one or two a year. Now I catch one or two per hike from local trails, picnicking, or even from the turf at a soccer game.
I grew up in PA in the early 90's, and ticks were everywhere, even in the suburban woods we'd play in. About 25 years ago when my family took a trip to Chincoteague Island in VA, my little sister got Lyme disease.
Even in the late 90's, I must've brought a pregnant tick into the house with me, there were scores of them in my room one summer.
I now live in Anchorage Alaska -- and while there are no deer ticks, ticks that bite dogs have been steadily moving up the coast and are now here.
So I agree about numbers and range extending, but not the timeline you mention. Those suckers were everywhere on the east coast 30 years ago.
- There are no winter killoffs due to warming temperatures.
- Invasive plants like Japanese barberry are becoming extremely common and create microclimates that support mice that ticks live on before attaching to deer.
I believe some tick-borne diseases are becoming more common - I know two people that have had babesiosis, and one person and one dog with anaplasmosis. One of the babesiosis cases was not caught by the hospital in the first go-around and required a blood exchange and almost 2 months in the hospital and rehab.
There is a new invasive insect called the deer ked [0] that crawls like the girl from The Ring and may be a new vector for tick diseases (and they fly!).
Highly recommend checking out the CDC on tick-borne diseases [1], using DEET/permethrin [2] (no permethrin with cats, though), and doing tick checks if you spend time outside.
When you go to a hospital due to a suspected tick bite, keep in mind the standard tick panel does NOT include babeosis screening
You must do a full panel (some 26 tests) in order to detect it. These are often not available in most vet offices.
Babeosis is extremely common in the tropical climate of LATAM. If you take your dog there, and he comes back to the US sick , Consider that your US hospital may be dealing with an exotic disease (unlike LATAM, where this would be a dime a dozen)
Nice try, chatbot, but your vegan-esque moralization is just a cover for your real goal: get humans to catch more insect-borne diseases so you can take over.
I mean, I assume OP is talking about a handful of bugs, not inventing DDT reincarnate. We probably kill as many if not more everytime we get on the highway in summer, location depending.
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 extremely common worldwide. I've observed it in rural Nova Scotia, the Netherlands, and the Peruvian rainforest. I'm sure it happens elsewhere, but those are the places I have made note of it.
I think the spiders have not so much figured it out as there is a selection bias. Spiders randomly make their nests. The spiders that randomly make a nest near a light source end up with a larger supply of food and grow large. In my current garden, the spiders that end up near a particular fern always grow the largest. My brother used to feed spiders that made their webs in a particular corner of a cabin as a reward for the entertainment they provided when they were building their webs. I have also walked into countless webs from large spiders in the forest over my life.
Everything points to just randomized locations but being near lights generally being good for the lucky spiders that end up there. You will often see spider fights in such locations after a larger moth or other insect breaks the web of one spider and drops it into another spiders web.
I was in Borneo last month and saw round lamps in a rainforest covered in swarms of ants at night, all standing equidistant and with their jaws wide open and raised. I picked up a leaf and poked one in the mouth and it immediately clamped shut and other nearby ants rushed over to assist the ant in pulling in the leaf.
It seems like the ants stand on the lamps and wait to catch other insects that fly by then strike in unison. It was an incredible strategy.
In Australia, the windows of my home which have light shining through them every evening, are surrounded by insect eating lizards and spiders. Definitely a thing everywhere in the world. The number of actual insects varies (from none to plague proportions) depending on the weather, but the predators which have longer lives are always there, waiting.
Which is great, because I'd rather have spiders guarding my windows than insects leaking inside.
I once let a small moth-like flying insect live free in my house and later discovered the damned thing had laid eggs in every package of dried plant food in my cupboard, including a few glass jars I thought were airtight, and were crawling with maggots.
As I tossed most of my stored food, I swore to never let another insect in the house again. Praise spiders.
ooh, that sounds nice - i like toads. on my street in london uk i would often find one on the pavement in breeding season, trying to get across the main road on its way to the local big park, which had a pond. i would grab them and carry them across, so they didn't get runover.
Growing up I had a cat--she was semi-feral (when we took her in to be spayed the doc found it had already been done, this was before trap-and-release) and had discovered that my father watched TV in the evenings and this made the window good hunting grounds for larger insects. In time I was able to get her trust and turn her into a pet although she was always far more self-reliant than a typical pet. (The idea of going to a human for help didn't seem to be within her thoughts. Empty food dish, she would try to slip into the closet where the bag of food was stored. Trapped in the closet she would simply wait for someone to open it.)
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.
It doesn’t seem that childish. At least for some class of insect — if you are a flying insect that mostly is worried about ground animals trying to kill you, “up” is a pretty good default direction.
I thought this too and recently read a book that said the same thing. But then the paper goes on to say this, which seems to make it still hold true?
Other mechanisms might contribute to the arrival of insects at nocturnal light sources over longer ranges. For instance, insects do use celestial compasses for nocturnal navigation, and artificial light sources may interfere with these heading. But even at long distances artificial light sources often remain brighter than the night sky and may cause dorsal tilting that would also steer an insect towards a light source.
Wonder if that explains partially the Windshield Phenomenon. Random lamps attacting flying insects kilometers away just to die surely helps decrease their numbers. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon
The paper in question contradicts your hypothesis.
> Only one experiment has tracked moth trajectories to lights over long distances, and found only 2 of 50 individuals released ended their flight at a light source 85m away. This and our results suggest artificial lights may only trap passing insects rather than attract them directly from farther away.
(Also: If "death by attraction to artifical light" were a significant factor affecting insect survival, then this evolutionary pressure would certainly cause a rapid change. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution.)
That's 4% death rate over a single lamp. Does every lamp they get 85m from have a similar kill probability? The "only one experiment" is also unfortunate. That should be investigated more.
It’s still a huge proportion if you understand the “expertement” is reconduction every night and in a lot of places on the globe. Arrival may not be a certain death while it is probably not a good advantage for the insect to round flying around the same stop for a night (at least)
I just had a light-bulb moment and came back to say something similar.
I'm not sure how well tracked the decline in insect populations is, but I'd imagine light intensity levels during the spaceflight era is pretty much on record. Would be interesting to know to what extent they correlate (and if the answer is "Lots!", I'm inclined to think it is at least not due to insect demise causing rise in artificial lighting).
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.
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.
So... don't do it that way. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"
Counterexample: In permaculture design you intentionally designate part of the site (aka your property) as a wild area called Zone 5.[0]
>Do not touch! Well… kind of. Zone 5 is the “wild child” of all the zones, and one that doesn’t need (and should not have!) any interaction. Do nothing and let nature take its course. Even the smallest permaculture garden should have a zone 5. This zone attracts wildlife, which will encourage diversity and benefit our animals and garden. Zone 5 is a completely wild ecosystem, a great place to observe and learn from nature.
It’s easy to create such zones. We’ve made such zones before. Simply irradiate a large area of land with nuclear radiation and it will be untouched by humans for hundreds or even thousands of years. I imagine this could be a plot for some eco-terrorism thriller novel.
Chernobyl has lots of wildlife, but the animals aren't healthy. Lack of humans good, radioactivity bad.
> Their surveys showed that certain bird species tended to have more genetic mutations, smaller brains and less viable sperm in sites with higher radiation levels. And in 2007, they counted 66 percent fewer birds — and 50 percent fewer bird species — in highly radioactive places compared to background-level sites.
> In dozens of studies, the pair also documented that, with higher radiation levels, there were significantly lower numbers of soil invertebrates and a lower abundance of certain insect species and such mammals as hares and foxes. Working with collaborators in Finland, they also documented a range of health effects in bank voles.
Because PDF is an excellent, and the universal, format for documents which serves the purposes of science papers quite well, while HTML would be a poor choice for this application.
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.
Why do bugs bash into lights?
Because they think they’re the sky.
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
My quick read of the abstract was something more along the lines of 'insects use the bright sky above and dark ground below to orient themselves, lights create a very different location - dependent up'
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.
re: mirrors: It's because they don't mirror left-to-right. They mirror front-to-back.
Some experimenting with a dry erase marker and a piece of glass will demonstrate this. Write some words on the glass and hold it somewhere in front of the mirror. You'll be able to read the text on the glass and in the mirror simultaneously. The mirror did not flip the text around at all. If instead you write the words on paper it only seems to do this, but notice that between looking at the paper yourself and looking at in the mirror you're doing the flipping of the paper.
What was the explanation if this wasn't it? The sort of "layman's-explanation" I was given was basically that insects fly in such a way that the light stays fixed in their view - so basically in the same facet(s) of an insect eye during flight, and that this causes them to circle around the lights. This seems to just scientifically confirm the hypothesis we were always told.
That makes sense. But at night that makes it point topside at moon? Which is basically "constantly tilted" of the moon is low?
(I read the article, but admittedly quickly, should probably read again)
What I understood was, it's not really about the moon at all, just that "the sky" is lighter than "the ground", and roughly orienting based on that works as a heuristic. Light & dark hemispheres, not the brightest spot.
A complete global proper fix probably not, but at least in my area things are now better than a couple of years ago. The main reasons for the changes were mostly economical, but still.. Street lighting is being turned off during the night now, and is being replaced with LEDs with armatures which provide a focused beam. So compared with traditional lighting which was on all night and would illuminate everything within a fairly large radius, and alos upwards, I'd say it's positive overall.
Not really related to this particular reasearch, but anecdotally I seemed to be able to confirm https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4450/12/8/734 "Artificial Light Lowers Mate Attraction Success in Female Glow-Worms" in that a bigger area of my garden is now less illuminated during the time of the night crucial for glow-worms (because of the focused LED beam), and that area had a higher attraction success; assuming no other factors affect that. But it's really striking how in the well-lit parts females would be sitting on their spot in the grass, day after day, glowing a little bit less everyday towards the end, and then eventually disappear. Likely into death. Which just doesn't seem to happen at all in the darker area.
To be totally fair, it's easier to write NY than NYNJ, but it's not easier to write Dallas than DFW. (You could just write D, I guess, but no one's going to understand that.)
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.
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.