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At night in the Costa Rican cloud forest, a small team of international scientists switched on a light and waited. Soon, insects big and small descended out of the darkness. Moths with spots like unblinking eyes on each wing. Shiny armored beetles. Flies. Once, even a praying mantis. Each did the same hypnotic, dizzying dance around the bulb as if attached to it with invisible string.
Excitement spread through the group of researchers, even thoughthis phenomenon was not new to them. The difference is they now have cutting-edge technology and high-speed cameras — capable of capturing the fast, frenzied orbits — to map the hard-to-track movements of hundreds of insects and tease out secrets surrounding why they act so strange around light at night.
A surprising detail surfaced in the data: In flight, the insects kept their backs facing the artificial light source.
“You watch the videos in slow motion and see it happening again and again,” said Yash Sondhi, a recent FIU biological sciences Ph.D. graduate and current postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “Maybe when people notice it, like around their porchlights or a streetlamp, it looks like they are flying straight at it, but that’s not the case.”
This never-before-documented behavior, published in the journal Nature Communications, provides a new explanation and while it confirms light is disruptive to insects, it also offers new insight into this conservation concern.
news.fiu.edu
Excitement spread through the group of researchers, even thoughthis phenomenon was not new to them. The difference is they now have cutting-edge technology and high-speed cameras — capable of capturing the fast, frenzied orbits — to map the hard-to-track movements of hundreds of insects and tease out secrets surrounding why they act so strange around light at night.
A surprising detail surfaced in the data: In flight, the insects kept their backs facing the artificial light source.
“You watch the videos in slow motion and see it happening again and again,” said Yash Sondhi, a recent FIU biological sciences Ph.D. graduate and current postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “Maybe when people notice it, like around their porchlights or a streetlamp, it looks like they are flying straight at it, but that’s not the case.”
This never-before-documented behavior, published in the journal Nature Communications, provides a new explanation and while it confirms light is disruptive to insects, it also offers new insight into this conservation concern.
Millennia-old mystery about insects and light at night gets new explanation
Spoiler: They aren't mistaking it for the moon.
news.fiu.edu
