Moths and light

[Ian Woiwod]

 There is quite a literature on the attraction of insects to light, although,
as pointed out elsewhere, much of it seems to be rather contradictory. A good
starting point might be the book 'Trap Responses of Flying Insects' by R.C.
Muirhead-Thomson, Academic Press 1991. 

In partial answer to David Chesmore's query. There was an active group at the
Cranfield Institute of Technology's Ecological Physics Research Group (now
defunct) that got into this area a few years ago and did some useful work,
although far too little was published. Some of this work did involve the use
videos and infra-red detectors to study the behaviour of insects near traps.
There were 3 unpublished PhD thesis by G.A.Bent (1982), P.A.Gaydecki(1984) and
W.J. McGeachie (1987). Only McGeachie really published anything  (e.g. A remote
sensing method for the estimation of light trap efficiency, Bull. Ent. Res
(1988), 78, 379 - 385.)

Incidently I was rather surprised when someone stated that moths could not see
stars. Can anyone confirm this? In 1979 Sotthibandhu and Baker published a
paper (Anim. Behav 27, 786-800) that claimed that on starlit nights, in the
absense of the moon, stellar orientation using stars about 95 deg from the pole
star were strongly implicated in the navigation of Noctua pronuba. Was this
impossible?

Ian Woiwod