Attracted like a month by a llama, or not?
A new study has apparently rendered the idiom obsolete, refuting the long-held belief (dating back to the Roman Empire around 1 AD) that flying insects are attracted to light.
Instead, many insects do not fly directly toward a light source and actually turn their backs on the light when they hover around outdoor lanterns, streetlights, and porch lights at night, states the study published last week in Nature Communications.
But another saying could apply to describe the behavior of winged insects around a light. They do not distinguish between up and down when in the presence of artificial lighting, the Jan. 30 study found.
The team of international researchers believes that the lights turned on by humans confuse the insects, which normally use the brightest thing they detect (the sky) to determine what is up and what is down during flight.
The researchers discovered that the insects do not fly directly towards a light source, but rather turn their backs to it. Simon Kovacic – stock.adobe.com
Scientists believe that insects mistake artificial lights for the sky, so they turn their backs – or their upper bodies – toward light sources, trapping them in an “exhausting cycle” to reorient themselves in space, according to a study. new study. statement accompanying the study.
The study’s authors recorded the movements of 11 different orders of insects with high-speed motion capture cameras, first in a controlled laboratory experiment and then in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, home to a diverse ecosystem of insect species.
“In one of the first experiments, I let a large yellow underwing moth detach from my hand and fly directly over the UV bulb, and it immediately turned around,” said one of the researchers, Yash Sondhi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “But then we didn’t know if the behavior we saw and measured in the lab would also be seen in the wild.”
Scientists believe that insects use the brightest part of the sky to determine up and down when flying and may be confusing artificial lights with the sky, disorienting them. Alexey Protasov – stock.adobe.com
The researchers recorded more than 477 videos and used computer vision tools to reconstruct the flight paths of their test subjects from errors in 3D modeling. Almost all of the insects they recorded turned their backs to the light source.
“You watch the videos in slow motion and you see it happening over and over again,” the report’s author, Sondhi, said in the new statement released by the Florida Museum. “Maybe when people notice it, like around porch lights or a streetlight, it looks like they’re flying right at it, but that’s not the case.”
The scientists observed three different patterns of movements among the moths, butterflies, bees, wasps, dragonflies and more they filmed: orbiting the light source, stopping (characterized by a steep rise), and reversing.
In some cases, when insects flew directly over a bright light, they flipped completely and crashed. New Africa – stock.adobe.com
The most extreme inversion occurs when an insect flies directly over a light, causing it to completely turn around and often crash to the ground.
“This has been a prehistoric question. In the early writings, people noticed this around fire,” said report author and associate professor of biology at Florida International University, Jamie Theobald. “Turns out all of our speculation about why this is happening has been wrong, so this is definitely the coolest project I’ve ever been a part of.”
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Source: vtt.edu.vn