2023-04-22 02:37:56
It was the year 1880 when the scientist Thomas Alba Edison patented the first light bulb in history, he could not imagine at that time the damage it would cause to moths.
And it is that these insects have light sensors -located in their visual apparatus- that are tuned to dim light, so that they act as if they were real telescopes. In other words, any artificial lighting acts as a powerful magnet for them.
The moth’s eye is made up of a structure perfectly organized into hundreds of nanoscopic pillars, hexagonal in shape, which provide its ocular surface with an anti-reflective character for visible light in any direction in space. This is a true evolutionary advantage, since if its eyes reflected light the insect would be much more vulnerable to its natural enemies.
Moths use light sources as reference points to locate themselves in space, something similar to what the Phoenician navigators did more than twenty centuries ago with the North Star in their movements through the Mediterranean Sea.
The light confuses them
For millions of years fixing a light – that of the moon – worked for moths to be able to navigate safely in the immensity of darkness, but of course times have changed. Somehow the light sources make these insects believe that they have “reached the moon” when what they have really done has been to approach an invention of Homo sapiens.
The reality is that moths do not respond in the same way to all light bulbs: they are more sensitive to ultraviolet light waves, which would explain why they are more attracted to a white light source than a yellow one.
Proximity to the light source quite possibly causes a period of temporary blindness by overstimulating its light sensors, increasing its vulnerability to its natural predators during that time.
the bees too
Anthophiles, popularly known as bees, are also attracted to light sources, which in scientific terms is known as phototaxis. In their case they feel a special predilection for ultraviolet light and green light, and much less for red and orange light.
Something similar happens to the housefly for ultraviolet light, which becomes an irresistible stimulus, since its eyes are more sensitive to those wavelengths.
Human technology has ended up turning phototaxis, originally an evolutionary advantage, into suicidal behavior for these insects, so that some do not stop hitting the light source until they die and others simply end up being devoured by clever predators.
But not all insects are attracted to the light from light bulbs, in this alternative list are, for example, mosquitoes, which are much more seduced by heat, body odor and the carbon dioxide that human beings expel .
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