Will it be depicted as a month before the blaze or not?
New research appears to have made this idiom obsolete, disproving a 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 to the light source, but actually turn their backs on the light when they fly around outdoor lanterns, streetlamps, and porch lights at night. Research published last week Nature Communications State.
But another proverb may apply to explain the behavior of winged insects around lights. A study published on January 30th found that under artificial light, humans cannot tell where their height is.
An international team of researchers believes that lights turned on by humans confuse insects. Insects typically use what’s brightest, the sky, to determine what’s up and what’s down during flight.
Scientists think the insects may mistake artificial light for the sky, so they turn away from the light source or turn their bodies upwards, becoming trapped in a “cycle of wear and tear” as they orient themselves in space. . According to the new release Along with studying.
The study authors recorded the movements of 11 different insect eyes with a high-speed motion capture camera. The experiments were first conducted in a controlled laboratory and then in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, which are home to a diverse ecosystem of insect species.
“In one of our first experiments, we took off a large yellow underwing moth from our hand and flew it right over a UV light bulb. It immediately flipped over,” said one of the researchers. said Yash Sondhi, a postdoctoral fellow. Florida Museum of Natural History. “But we didn’t know at the time whether the behaviors we observed and measured in the lab were also observed in the wild.”
The researchers recorded more than 477 videos and used computer vision tools to reconstruct the bug test subjects’ flight paths through 3D modeling. Almost all the insects they recorded had their backs to the light source.
“If you watch the video in slow motion, you can see it repeating over and over again,” report author Sondhi said in a new release issued by the Florida Museum. “When people notice it, like around a porch light or a street light, it may seem like they’re flying straight towards it, but that’s not the case.”
The researchers observed three different movement patterns in the moths, butterflies, bees, wasps, and dragonflies they photographed: circling around a light source, stalling (a movement characterized by a sudden rise), and reversing. did.
In the most extreme case, an inversion occurs when an insect flies directly over the light, causing it to completely flip over and impact the ground.
“This is a question that dates back to prehistoric times. In early writings, people were aware of this when they were near fire,” said report author Jamie Theobald, an associate professor of biology at Florida International University. Ta. “All of our speculations about why that happens turned out to be wrong. So this is definitely the coolest project I’ve been a part of.”
