I have LED headlights and an LED light bar on my tractor and I can say with 100% confidence that bugs swarm both. To the point I have to wear glasses to keep them out of my eyes if I’m on it for more than about 30 seconds at night.
I’m guessing he’s confusing the dramatic drop in insect life overall with a change in behavior due to different lights.
Insects are attracted to low wavelength light, which includes both UV and blue light. Cool color LEDs are usually blue LEDs, and are often used for headlights/etc because they get higher lumen ratings for the power used. Headlights/lightbars are also really bright compared to porch lights.
If you compare an incandescent soft white porch light to a similar brightness soft white led light, you will probably see dramatically more insects at the incandescent bulb.
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> We found that LEDs attracted significantly fewer insects than other light sources, but found no significant difference in attraction between the “cool” and “warm white” LEDs.
I love to shoot long exposure timelapse of the night sky. I set up a couple of LEDs dimmed as low as possible to light a bit of the foreground (over the course of the long exposure the low light adds up so it looks normal for those not familiar). Out of sheer laziness, I just placed them on either side of my tripod. The next day after processing the shot, it was pretty much ruined because of all of the bugs showing up as tracers in each frame.
Welp, they do for mine. I've had to stop turning on outdoor LEDs because angry bees kept showing up, and there'd be 3-10 dead ones on my doorstep every morning. These are white bulbs. Might be "zombees."
Also, not sure about white bulbs, but those color-configurable spotlights definitely emit UV at least when set to anything near blue/purple. They cause certain things to glow. Probably white is doing it too but it's harder to see.
The color configurable bulbs or the high CRI bulbs typically use a 400nm led source and some do use a 380nm but those are much rarer and expensive. Also almost any amount of plastic or glass will significantly absorb that wavelength of UV.
I have a 405nm laser pointer and it makes certain things (any% titanium dioxide) absurdly bright from fluorescence. So you probably aren’t getting UV from those bulbs, but certainly some IR.
The streetlights in my neighborhood still have the round photo sensors on top, that have something like a watt of standby current for the sensor itself. I don't think they're trying hard to save powwer.
The ones that have a watt of standby are the really old models (probably not sold for the last 30yrs) where you'd have an LDR controlled relay with no electronics
Anything more modern than that, even if it has a similar case, will use less power
A low-voltage photocell uses like 5mA @ 24VAC these days, it’s nowhere near a watt. You can buy a wireless battery powered photocell or occupancy sensor that will last a decade.
The article bluntly states: "Moonlight contains ultraviolet (UV) and infrared wavelengths because it is merely reflected sunlight. Insects cue on UV, believing it to be the moon. . . . Incandescent lights transmit UV but LEDs do not. Insects are far less attracted to LED."
However, my mind developed a similar conjecture to your's: what if the common frequencies of PWM occur within a kinetic visual blindspot of insect vision, like human saccades [0] in the novel Blindsight [1], so that insects are not aware of the LED at all?
They've had many generations to evolve alongside all human false light sources. Insect generations are usually pretty short. Perhaps they just find it evolutionary useful to cluster around human sources of light. Presence of human food, liklihood of bumping into other insects of the same species, warmth, etc.
If human sources of light were interfering somehow, they've had hundreds or thousands of generations to breed out that proclivity.
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.
I really don’t think UV is playing much of a role here. You could also sort their chart by power usage, or IR produced. The paper conclusion paragraph even states UV and IR as candidates but the article just says UV.
> Sky is always brighter than the land, moon is not required.
Speaking of things being wrong...how can you come to this conclusion? There are many beaches where turtle hatchlings get confused by all of the lights on land where they crawl away from the ocean instead of towards it. Land is so bright, that the vast majority of humans can no longer see the night sky. So again I ask, how do you come to the conclusion that land is darker than the sky?
If P then Q, P therefore Q. Q is not the conclusion, it's just the consequent. If P is false, then Q could be true, but claiming Q is true because P is true when P is actually false is a wrong conclusion.
Yes, you need some ultraviolet to attract insects. That's why bug-zappers have near UV lamps. They're usually compact fluorescent bulbs. Some ads say 365nm is the right color.
I think it’s to do with the LED flicker. You can sometimes see it in your peripheral vision (ie your light/dark receptors) but your RGB cones aren’t as good at spotting it.
Insects eyes are biologically very different.
With LED lighting, if you have lots of spot lights in the ceiling and and open door, you’ll likely find that the light leaving the house is a bath of reflection from different sources inside the house and that likely cancels out the worst of the flicker.
I wonder how much of it is also the LED flicker. If I was a small bug and moving quickly with a high visual refresh rate, I would probably hate the experience of the LED flicker
There are odd visual illusions though, like humans perceive the Wagon-Wheel Effect even though there's no obvious reason it should happen. This is the effect where the speed of a rotating object varies depending on its sync with a discrete exposure period.
You mention it yourself, these illusions only occur with "discrete exposure periods". This is moreso related to video recordings and less about how the eye sees actual physical objects. Such illusions do NOT occur with natural light.
Edit; to be clear there is a version of the wagon wheel effect under natural light, I'm just saying that the main one with discrete exposure periods does not occur irl
I'm confused. I thought seeing/measuring lower frequencies due to a low sampling frequency, where the lower perceived frequency is basically the modulus of the real frequency and the sampling rate, is a well-known phenomenon independent of the actual sensor implementation.
I highly recommend the pop science book An Immense World by Ed Yong to disabuse you of this notion. There is a sort of refresh rate (not exactly the same but good metaphor) for everything at every level of living being we study. It gives enough information for you to read the actual studied should you have more questions after reading it.
Yeah, i know that's how the physics works, but effectively my computer monitor doesn't flicker for me but a strobe light does. Whatever the proper term for that is what I'm talking aobut
But there is a neurological component in "optical processing" that can be modeled as a discrete rate of update although the underlying physiology is still being investigated.
Try walking outside in a clear night. Look up, notice some stars, or aircraft lights. Now rotate in place, and see how low your vision's FPS is in the dark: the rotation will be visibility jumpy.
An insect, with its much simpler visual processing, and facing a bright light, will likely achieve a much higher FPS, sufficient for the sub-kilohertz flicker to be very visible.
For a game i tried to model the behavior of our eyes in the dark and read up on a lot of that stuff. Not once was there a suggestion of jumpy vision. And that is also not my experience. In low light things begin to smudge, lots of ghosting the further in the periphery of your view they move in.
I bought LED "bug lights" — those yellow bulbs that are supposed to be invisible to bugs.
Every bulb in the pack electrically failed within 10 minutes.
I gave up and went back to an incandescent. Still works perfectly.
So sick of the zero-quality LED bulbs that have entirely flooded the market. Of course they had their hand forced by government mandates, people needed mass quantities of cheap bulbs that could match a 75¢ incandescent. They didn't have this problem when LED bulbs were $20 each (and weighed about as much, due to the heat sink).
It was always a scam because LED bulbs need power supply and that creates heat, switching hundreds of volts ac to low volt dc. They don't last any longer than incandescent in fact they have much shorter lifetimes.
A cheaply made bulb doesn't really support your theory though. Before LEDs, the anti-bug yellow incandescent bulb was available. It puts of a horrendous light and most people didn't like them. It's in the top 3 of lights that I do not like: 1) anything CFL, 2) any cool white (>3600K) light at night, 3) ugly yellow anti-bug light, 4) whatever the ugly greenish light 7-11 uses at some gas stations, 5) 4300K fluoro tubes.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
IIR, hydrogen flames can emit enough of their energy in the UV for that to be a serious issue - both direct human exposure, and degradation of exposed surfaces and equipment.
lived with candles and kerocene lanterns, etc for years and the odd bug will go nuts and spiral in, but not very many
but all in all, there are way less bugs everywhere now
I’m guessing he’s confusing the dramatic drop in insect life overall with a change in behavior due to different lights.
If you compare an incandescent soft white porch light to a similar brightness soft white led light, you will probably see dramatically more insects at the incandescent bulb. .
> We found that LEDs attracted significantly fewer insects than other light sources, but found no significant difference in attraction between the “cool” and “warm white” LEDs.
So, no, not my experience at all.
Also, not sure about white bulbs, but those color-configurable spotlights definitely emit UV at least when set to anything near blue/purple. They cause certain things to glow. Probably white is doing it too but it's harder to see.
I have a 405nm laser pointer and it makes certain things (any% titanium dioxide) absurdly bright from fluorescence. So you probably aren’t getting UV from those bulbs, but certainly some IR.
The thing that insects can see and we don't is the rapid flashing of a PWM power controller.
I wonder if these streetlights have power saving fade-ins as the nightfall approaches instead of clicking on at sunset.
Like - https://doi.org/10.1109/CSNT51715.2021.9509652
Note you can make LEDs dim without PWM via constant current drivers, just less efficient as the duty cycle is 100%, they look much nicer though
Anything more modern than that, even if it has a similar case, will use less power
This Acuity occ sensor/photocell combo draws 4mA @ 24VDC: https://pdmassets.azureedge.net/library/SS/documents/specshe...
However, my mind developed a similar conjecture to your's: what if the common frequencies of PWM occur within a kinetic visual blindspot of insect vision, like human saccades [0] in the novel Blindsight [1], so that insects are not aware of the LED at all?
0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10991/
1. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#:~:text=%22There...
They've had many generations to evolve alongside all human false light sources. Insect generations are usually pretty short. Perhaps they just find it evolutionary useful to cluster around human sources of light. Presence of human food, liklihood of bumping into other insects of the same species, warmth, etc.
If human sources of light were interfering somehow, they've had hundreds or thousands of generations to breed out that proclivity.
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.
Sky is always brighter than the land, moon is not required.
Lamp movement is the confusion of where is “up”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44785-3
Speaking of things being wrong...how can you come to this conclusion? There are many beaches where turtle hatchlings get confused by all of the lights on land where they crawl away from the ocean instead of towards it. Land is so bright, that the vast majority of humans can no longer see the night sky. So again I ask, how do you come to the conclusion that land is darker than the sky?
They didn't say no bug ever goes to any led light.
Insects eyes are biologically very different.
With LED lighting, if you have lots of spot lights in the ceiling and and open door, you’ll likely find that the light leaving the house is a bath of reflection from different sources inside the house and that likely cancels out the worst of the flicker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon-wheel_effect
https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/subjective-strobosco...
Edit; to be clear there is a version of the wagon wheel effect under natural light, I'm just saying that the main one with discrete exposure periods does not occur irl
Try walking outside in a clear night. Look up, notice some stars, or aircraft lights. Now rotate in place, and see how low your vision's FPS is in the dark: the rotation will be visibility jumpy.
An insect, with its much simpler visual processing, and facing a bright light, will likely achieve a much higher FPS, sufficient for the sub-kilohertz flicker to be very visible.
I bought LED "bug lights" — those yellow bulbs that are supposed to be invisible to bugs.
Every bulb in the pack electrically failed within 10 minutes.
I gave up and went back to an incandescent. Still works perfectly.
So sick of the zero-quality LED bulbs that have entirely flooded the market. Of course they had their hand forced by government mandates, people needed mass quantities of cheap bulbs that could match a 75¢ incandescent. They didn't have this problem when LED bulbs were $20 each (and weighed about as much, due to the heat sink).
^ Obligatory Chubbyemu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VtUGoGZtI8
I guess it is most likely some combination of the above, but if there's any evidence it would be a neat reframing
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
We use UV/IR combo Flame detectors at work for this purpose.