Top
Best
New

Posted by speckx 17 hours ago

Insects don't swarm at LED lights(www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org)
281 points | 136 commentspage 2
joshspankit 9 hours ago|
They’re missing a lot of variables here.

Never minding IR and UV, not even a visible-light spectrogram of each light source

karim79 14 hours ago||
I made a huge LED display using lifx tiles (which are no longer sold). 5x5 tiles in a square, so I could hack video rendering and images to the lights. Each tile had 64 LED bulbs which could be independently controlled, both in brightness and colour.

When I did this I was in the countryside and I can state without hesitation that the insects loved it and flocked to it and while I found it cute, it was annoying because they would occasionally get trapped in the small gaps between the tiles and get stuck.

I'm therefore 100% convinced that insects just love fancy lighting setups.

oakwhiz 17 hours ago||
The study didn't cover high pressure sodium bulbs, the previously popular type in street lamps.
actionfromafar 16 hours ago|
The best light.
andai 9 hours ago||
The article has an photo of a street full of beautiful golden HPS lamps, and one Guantanamo-grade cold LED.
vondur 13 hours ago||
The outside LED lights on my RV would disagree with this.
dddddaviddddd 9 hours ago||
There are some LEDs that are designed to emit UV light. They're used to attract insects. e.g. https://entoquip.com/product/entoquip-light/
krige 6 hours ago||
They definitely do for my LED desklight.
nxpnsv 16 hours ago||
Wow. I put spotlight on a sheet in the garden to figure out what moths we have. Got nothing, and maybe this is why.
nemo1618 15 hours ago|
The gold standard for mothing is a mercury vapor bulb. They are pricey and power-hungry, but they'll have your sheet covered in bugs in no time!
HeyLaughingBoy 15 hours ago||
Um, no. I live on a farm and often have to do chores in the dark with an LED headlight. Sometimes I have to turn it off because I'm dive bombed by so many insects.
Xcelerate 17 hours ago||
I wonder if it’s only the UV that makes a difference. I have some Yuji SunWave bulbs (and the NIR versions). Would be interesting to test those at night against normal LED bulbs and incandescent.
theandrewbailey 16 hours ago|
Maybe this helps answer the question of 'where did the bugs go', because windshields aren't as full of them today compared to 20-30 years ago.
cbg0 16 hours ago||
The answer to that is pesticides. There's still plenty of insects ready to smash into your windshield in many parts of the world.
silisili 16 hours ago|||
I wonder what percentage is pesticides vs development? I currently live in an area(US) where a drive to the nearest city of size absolutely coats my car in bugs. US, mostly farmland(soybeans/corn). I wasn't here 30 years ago so can't say there's as many as then, likely not. But if it were only pesticides I'd expect the rural areas to have less bugs than the more developed areas...
aeonfox 15 hours ago|||
As someone who has made many interstate trips through Australia's farmland, I can say that over the decades there's definitely been a drop in windshield splatter. It's unsurprising that pesticide deployed at scale reduces bug populations. Even herbicides which aren't intended as insecticides have limited product advantage to being bug-safe (apart from pollinated crops... and even then). Some aren't even human-safe. An extreme example is paraquat, that while being a herbicide, is irreversibly deadly to humans^ when consumed even in tiny amounts.

^ Obligatory Chubbyemu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VtUGoGZtI8

dylan604 14 hours ago|||
I would lean towards the urbanization of the land as well. I rarely get bugs on my car in the city, but as soon as I head out to the country at night my car is covered. I had to stop at a gas station back in May not for gas but just to squeegee the windscreen so I could see again.
arcfour 16 hours ago|||
Pesticides weren't in use 20-30 years ago? Wouldn't more dangerous pesticides have been in use then, too, compared to now?
roromainmain 16 hours ago|||
They have been used much more massively since the 80s, price decreased significantly.
mcmcmc 16 hours ago|||
Yes, and advancements have made them both safer and more effective
r721 2 hours ago|||
There's a Wikipedia entry for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon
baoooooooooooo 16 hours ago|||
wow this would be a neat twist if true - we all defaulted to the negative explanation of having killed them all where a much more positive explanation might be that we're no longer luring them to their deaths at the leading edge of automobiles?

I guess it is most likely some combination of the above, but if there's any evidence it would be a neat reframing

faidit 14 hours ago|||
Colorado: "Insect biomass declined by ∼47% and abundance declined by ∼61.5% over the last 35 years." https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

Germany: "More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Puerto Rico: "dry weight biomass of arthropods captured in sweep samples had declined 4 to 8 times, and 30 to 60 times in sticky traps." https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1722477115

HelloMcFly 16 hours ago|||
The mass insect-death on windshield issue was as much a daytime issue and nighttime one.
amelius 16 hours ago|||
Are you sure about that?
Angostura 15 hours ago||
Yes. The daytime crop was always greater than at night
mahboi 16 hours ago|||
The McFlies don't think very much
calt 16 hours ago|||
My hypothesis is better wind tunnel testing for modern cars so that the bugs go over instead of splatting.
dylan604 14 hours ago||
I'd go with fewer people having experience driving not in a city, at least in this forum making the claims as GP
dylan604 14 hours ago||
I think they just all collectively got tired of hearing my dad's punny about "it doesn't have the guts to do that again" any time a bug squashed on the windscreen.
More comments...