this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
1564 points (98.0% liked)
memes
9363 readers
3568 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
if anything, I would think it'd be the opposite. LEDs are pretty capable of more narrow bandwidths natively, but old streetlights used to be a more pure kind of yellowy color, because they were low pressure sodium vapor lamps. Those kinds of lamps give off an incredibly narrow bandwidth of yellow light, and are pretty energy efficient. I would think, as we've made the transition from that to more wide-bandwidth LEDs, more insects would be attracted to the lights, and more insects would die. But I'm not quite sure one way or the other.
Well, I know more about the lamps than I do about the bugs and their behaviour. What I know is that there was no real standard that was universally adopted for what kind of bulb technology to use in most cities. Lately, almost every municipality has switched to installing LED lamps. Not all pre-LED lamps used LPS bulbs. Some were florescent, some were even HPS or even incandescent, if you go back far enough. From what I've been able to determine, sodium vapor was one of the most common at the end of the 20th century. Either LPS or HPS I would assume.
I get the impression HPS was more common, but again, it's going to vary wildly depending on municipality. HPS has a more spread spectrum than LPS, with plenty of emissions into the far red.
My assumption is that the yellow/red attracts insects because it resembles the sun. Effectively, if a bug is in a dark place (such as a cave or similar internal space, it will aim for the brightest source of light to try to find it's way outside (where food and other bugs are to mate with). I'm not sure what spectra bugs see, so I'm really only guessing as to whether sodium vapor or LED may attract them more or less than the other. I would assume any infrared would be a desirable wavelength for an insect to move towards, since our sun emits a lot of infrared.
In the end, I'm only guessing.