I’m guessing he’s confusing the dramatic drop in insect life overall with a change in behavior due to different lights.
It is quite possible that flies prefer one part of the light spectrum more than another part, but to say in the title that they don’t swarm at LEDs is misleading at best.
Also the light bulbs have excellent performance at "catching" bugs because they land on hot stuff and die. I had some GU-12 ceiling halogen lights in my previous apartment and the rims were always covered by bugs that decided to land there and as they were hot from halogens, boom, bug destruction machine
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.
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.
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
anecdote: I work in a factory, we have thousands of light fixtures. The older constant current LED fixtures have lasted a decade, the new PWM driven lights have had a ~1% failure rate.
Yes, adding an inductor will fix the problem, but that costs money. Not enough customers are complaining about the light flicker to justify the higher price.
In those days TV's were big CRT boxes, illuminated by the electron beam which would race across the screen row by row.
A housefly's "refresh rate" on its eyeballs is much higher than that of a human, so the fly wouldn't see an image as we do, but would presumably find it quite relaxing watching the dot of light slowly move across the screen.
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.
So, no, not my experience at all.
There are bugs. You photographed bugs. Maybe more than you would have without lights at all, maybe about the same.
Also better lights don’t necessarily mean perfect lights. We do lots of things to reduce harm. Unfortunately sometimes we do them too much and conserve a significant fraction of the original harm by increasing demand.
I often visit a place full of swallows and mosquitoes. The swallows eat mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes eat me. So when I get bit, I joke I'm feeding the birds.
Also different insects are blind to various areas of the spectrum LED lights cover. So you just get different creatures showing up.
An incandescent filament bulb will probably give you warmer color in the deeper reds. Too high of a color temperature at night makes things look odd, and you may not immediately notice the HDR capture is skewed.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000I17G4O
The neutral "Bright White" Philips A19 Ultra Definition Frosted Dimmable LED Bulbs are about as good as you can get with cheap retail consumer E26 bulbs. Still, the weaker reds may to be an issue depending on what you are capturing, and one may have to drop to a lower color-temperature indoor version like "Soft White". =3
Having a strobe every exposure during a timelapse is annoying though. You'd get run out on a rail at a star party with nonsense like that. Sometimes, it really helps to think about others when doing your own thing and not being an asshat just because you want to do something
Maybe converting the yellow area of the image into grey scale would give you the highlights, and the color loss could look intentional in moonlight.
There are plenty of intervalometer options around, and even a few Arduino projects for the creative.
Best of luck, =3
Sky is always brighter than the land, moon is not required.
Lamp movement is the confusion of where is “up”
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?
take something you know to be true. now come up with a stupid, falacious argument for it. now you can see that seeing an argument is bad doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong.
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.
They didn't say no bug ever goes to any led light.
Is it too much to expect super smarty hn developer types to know how to read? Yeah looks like.
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
Have a look at https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.93.8.3693; my point was that there is documented research that says even with continuous illumination and an (apparently) continuous camera (the brain), this happens:
> The illusion of wheels or other radial patterns rotating back- ward in continuous light, together with the perception of supernumerary spokes, suggests that the human visual system processes sequential episodes of information rather than a continuous temporal flow. In addition to accounting for this remarkable illusion, a strategy of vision that parses the world in this way can explain why movies are so realistic (simply because that is the way we normally see things) and how we detect motion (by comparing the position of the same objects in sequential episodes).
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'm told insects are more sensitive in that regard, due to having brains with fewer layers.
Never minding IR and UV, not even a visible-light spectrogram of each light source
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.
^ 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
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).
The leds do, but the "low-quality" electronic drivers do not and die first. Often well before the advertised lifespan.
Tell that to my 10 year old Philipps Hue lights. I wonder if there is some other quality at work that would explain the difference...
We use UV/IR combo Flame detectors at work for this purpose.