'Endangered' Luna Moths

Roger C. KENDRICK kendrick at hkusua.hku.hk
Tue Sep 23 21:47:18 EDT 1997


Chris Raper wrote:
> ....
> MV Street lights? Sounds a recipe for disaster to me :-(
> 
> >I don't know how it is in Europe, but I suspect similar conditions
> >probably exist.
> 
> I don't think we use MV lights for street light here (I could be
> wrong). You do get moths etc attracted to lights but not in any
> significant numbers to affect the breeding success.

Many back streets in U.K. cities still use either 80 or 125W M.V. street
lighting. Coventry (where I trapped on a regular basis, i.e. average 2
to 3 times per week, from 1991 to 1996) is slowly phasing out these in
favour of sodium lighting. In my experiance, my monitoring site (using a
125 W MV light), some 40 metres from the street, recorded a lot more
moths than I ever saw around the street lights - this is probably partly
due to the plastic or glass housing of street lamps that filters out
much of the UV, and possibly also due to the overall effect of mass
lighting, as already discussed over the last week or so. Even so, I
still recorded well over 350 species (macros and micros), which is a
very respectable total for a small garden just one mile from the city
centre and surrounded by both MV and sodium vapour street lights (within
a 300m radius - well within the catchment area of one 125W MV lamp on a
cloudy night - there are over 50 street lamps).

Roger.
________________________________________________
Roger C. KENDRICK
PhD student & Demonstrator, Dept of Ecology & Biodiversity
The University of Hong Kong
fax: (852) 24885285
mailto:kendrick at hkusua.hku.hk
http://web.hku.hk/~kendrick/hkmoth.htm   « Hong Kong Moths »
mail: Kadoorie Agricultural Research Centre
      The University of Hong Kong
      Lam Kam Road, Shek Kong,
      Yuen Long, New Territories
      Hong Kong


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