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Cool study, I've got this question before from my 7yo and had no idea :P If I'm reading it correctly, insects don't fly toward the light, they turn the front of their body toward it. Under natural light, this helps them fly correctly ("maintain proper flight attitude and control"), but with artificial light they end up just constantly flying around the light source?
Like for example an outdoor dining terrace?
This seems like a pretty important finding, entymology's version of cracking Fermat's Last Theorem. I wonder if there's a Nobel category for entymology.
I read about this explanation years ago. It's not novel. I don't remember where, though... It might have been from Feynman.
Fascinating that it has nothing to do with desire, which has tended to be our go-to as humans stretching back in particular to mythology and even antiquity (eg Aristotle IIRC: “things fall back to the ground because they have a desire to do so”)
Do insects desire food, or does the intensity of certain smells simply compel their mouth parts to start moving in a certain way?
Does this explain why bugs seem to swarm at sunset? Because the sun is lower towards the horizon it brings the bugs towards the ground?
> Contrary to the expectation of attraction, insects do not steer directly toward the light. Instead, insects turn their dorsum toward the light, generating flight bouts perpendicular to the source. Under natural sky light, tilting the dorsum towards the brightest visual hemisphere helps maintain proper flight attitude and control. Near artificial sources, however, this highly conserved dorsal-light-response can prod…
So now we can blame the insects bad attitude rather than our artificial lights.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read about this explanation years ago. It's not novel. I don't remember where, though... It might have been from Feynman.
This explanation is in a Cricket Magazine I have from the mid-80s, so perhaps there's something new here also?
The introduction of this paper lists some other explanations that you may or may not have seen in the past and it says some have been disproven and some have not yet been tested.