We Were Completely Wrong About Why Bugs Are Attracted To Lights

okay this is one of those videos I guess I have to start with a video in this case this bugs flying around the light something that I'm sure most of us are quite familiar with as a matter of fact as mentioned in the study we're going to be discussing today apparently insects being attracted to artificial light was even mentioned in some of the earliest writing in the Roman Empire so naturally this is something that existed with us for as long as humans were able to produce light apparently even use this to trap bugs in order to catch them but despite the famous expression drawn like a moth to a flame and despite this being one of those things we probably don't really think about what exactly is happening here and well we now have an official answer and it's maybe not a happy answer it's actually somewhat depressing at least it didn't really make me particularly happy once the scientists explain the actual mechanism and so hello wonderful person this is Anton today we're going to discuss a relatively recent study but as always you can find any description below with a simple title why fly insects gather at artificial light something that was initially started a few years back and something that now has a very good and very official confirmation with a very obvious answer being no the insects are not attracted to light at all even though it obviously appears as they fly around the light and so let's discuss this unusual phenomenon in a little bit more detail and I guess talk about what this means for insects in general and obviously this is not the first time researchers tried to answer this as a matter of fact a lot of previous propositions tried to explain this in a lot of different ways for example maybe insects were drawn to light through some kind of a Escape mechanism or basically they saw the light as streaks of sunlight between foliage and were flying toward it in order to escape this would be some kind of a innate response that seems to be present in a lot of different insights but this turned out to be not correct other suggestions involved the moon and and so maybe in some of the night insects they often mistaken the artificial light for the light coming from the Moon that they might use for navigation and so they would fly toward it thinking it's the moon but it turned out to be some kind of a lamp but this explanation was a little bit too simple because we don't really see insects flying toward the moon either then some researchers propose that maybe it's the heat maybe the insects are just attracted to warmth coming from the light but this was disproven when similar effects were observed with LED lights which don't produce enough heat detectable by insects and lastly there was a proposition that well maybe they're actually Blinded By the Light and end up being confused flying in strange patterns basically crashing into the lamp because they just can't see anything and though these were all I guess very reasonable explanations they just didn't really have enough evidence to prove any of this especially because there was a lot of counter evidence and so in order to uncover exactly what's going on here the researchers used something brilliant okay they actually just used a light but on top of this they used an extremely fast camera able to film everything in slow motion and then they use different Lights by placing them in different types of locations and also in different orientations just to see how various insects especially moths that are known for this would react in the process and one of the first discoveries they made was that yeah none of the insects were actually aiming at the light at all it even appeared as if they were not doing anything special as if they were just flying straight and so basically in their insect brains they were not reacting to anything they were just doing their own thing but what ended up happening was that they were changing directions unconsciously okay I guess the word unconsciously is maybe not the right word to use because we don't really know if they have Consciousness but you know what I mean this was an instinctual Behavior they were instinctually changing direction when extremely close to the light and this was usually done in three separate ways orbiting Behavior stoling Behavior or sometimes inverting behavior and all of this depended on the orientation of the light and this was a giveaway or a very important clue to what's actually happening here the researchers realized that it was basically their instinctual Behavior sometimes referred to as dorsal light response something that scientists have been studying for a very long time and something that we know exists in a lot of different animals here's an example from fish and dorsal light response is a typee of an instinct it's an automatic response that causes insects to change direction depending on the light source an instinct that evolved to respond to the Sun and the Moon and so basically under normal light conditions insects automatically turn their back toward the light in a lot of different flying insects especially pollinating insects this is a way to control flight attitude or basically the control of the angle compared to Earth's Horizon in order to conduct accur accurate flight and this Instinct very likely evolved just to help insects determine where the up and down was obviously to make fly much easier and so in other words they can sense the light with their back and they're also able to correct their attitude based on the time of the day by sensing the brightest Source in the sky naturally this is something that evolved over hundreds of millions of years and then in the last few thousands of years they suddenly discovered that sometimes the sun and the moon are not the only sources sometimes something else becomes the brightest source and their Instinct kicks in forcing their poor bodies to reorient themselves toward the light or basically to reorient their back toward the light as a result it starts to appear as if they're orbiting the light source even though they're not really trying to do this at all it's their body trying to reassess where the up and down is constantly for hours and they can actually keep doing this for a very long time until something suddenly accidentally snaps them out of it but in their head or I guess in their tiny brains they're not doing any of this they're just trying to fly straight they have no idea they're flying in circles or that they're somehow confused except for the fact that sometimes they bump their heads without really understanding what's going on and so unfortunately artificial lights seem to directly interfere with a lot of their orientation instincts including things like gravity sending a lot of mixed messages confusing poor Moss or basically any other insect forcing them to fly in a lot of hectic ways with all of this directly confirmed and directly observed by taking slow motion pictures of individual insects around individual light sources and so after approximately 500 different recordings they essentially observed the same thing over and over every insect was repeating the same patterns and appeared disoriented creating unusual spirals they did not want to create and the only time the insects escaped was if something accidentally kicked them out of there for example wind and once they discover this they actually wanted to test okay which of these scenarios is the worst turns out that if you have overhead light it's slightly better than having light that's coming from underneath and so here if you have the light coming from underneath it basically causes a total inversion with insects spiraling toward the ground and potentially getting stuck in this behavior for a very long time which is a really intriguing Discovery when it comes to I guess the idea of light pollution and because a lot of these insects are pollinators or are essential for the biosphere of the planet this is potentially a somewhat unnerving and a somewhat disturbing Discovery the discovery that our artificial lights May create a lot of issues for a lot of insects that develop these dorsal instincts over millions of years but according to the researchers one way we could maybe help them is by trying to reduce upward facing lights as much as possible the downward lights like the one right here are not as bad but the upward lights seem to be the worst although the best solution would be obviously to reduce lights all together and so ever since I read the study I don't think I'll ever be able to see this the same way something that we always imagined as some kind of an attraction for a lot of these poor insects turned out to be their hell they're literally just stuck doing this over and over and they can't help themselves they're trying to fly straight they're trying to get away they can't they're trapped by a tiny artificial light on our porch but this is of course just one of many human based disturbances that seem to create problems for these super important bugs as you might know approximately 90% of all of the crops we depend on also kind of depend on these little guys quite a lot of them are pollinators and quite a lot of them are also responsible for protecting our crops in a lot of other ways but they can't really do that if they're stuck flying around the lamp with the conclusion being that it's maybe better not to leave so many lights on outside especially since light pollution causes there's a lot of other problems as well but this is maybe something we'll discuss sometime later at least for now a very intriguing Discovery once again a somewhat maybe depressing Discovery because we now know that the insects here are basically trapped but also a really important discovery that one day might change policies around the planet in order to reduce the overall light effect from various artificial sources something that I'm sure we'll learn more about in some of the future studies but actually even in this study there were some additional intriguing discoveries for example certain flies such as vinegar flies or certain types of moths like this one right here known as Oleander Hawk moth surprisingly were not affected by upward lights but were trapped by other types of Lights just like other insects so there seems to be quite a lot of variation in terms of the instinctual abilities but exactly how we can apply this to help the insects we don't really know yet at the same time the scientists still don't understand why insects don't perform similar orbiting Maneuvers when looking towards the moon for example so there might be something about artificial lights that forces their dorsal instincts to kick in it would also be really intriging to find out if the colors matter and more specifically if certain types of Lights do this more actively than other lights because this means that we can maybe adjust the lighting helping insects not to get trapped either way though until future studies or until more discoveries on this topic at least for now looks like all these bugs are still going to be trapped for quite some time but once we have some more details or more analysis I'll follow this up with the next video thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who loves running about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else support this channel on patreon by joining Channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find any description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always [Music] bye-bye [Music] n

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 1,513,442

Keywords: dorsal light response, bugs, insects, why do bugs fly toward the light, insects around the light, moths drawn to a flame, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, Trophallaxis, ants, ant, social stomach, shared stomach, ant stomach, distributed metabolism, ant roles, ant queen, ant warrior, ant colonies, superorganism, biomass, ant learning, ant colony optimization organism, sharing fluids, ant metabolism

Id: MzLe0Zk31_U

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024