Abstract
The light-emitting diode (LED) street light market is expanding globally, and it is important to understand how LED lights affect wildlife populations. We compared evasive flight responses of moths to bat echolocation calls experimentally under LED-lit and -unlit conditions. Significantly, fewer moths performed ‘powerdive’ flight manoeuvres in response to bat calls (feeding buzz sequences from Nyctalus spp.) under an LED street light than in the dark. LED street lights reduce the anti-predator behaviour of moths, shifting the balance in favour of their predators, aerial hawking bats.
Highlights
Lighting contributes 1900 million tonnes of CO2 to the Earth’s atmosphere annually [1]
Data from 39 moths were omitted from analyses because they were either flying more than 5 m from the street light column; flying less than 3 m from the ultrasonic speaker; flying greater than 5 m from the ultrasonic speaker; or because echolocation calls from wild bats were heard clearly on the bat detector during treatments
Our results show that light-emitting diode (LED) street lights negatively affect the probability that moths will exhibit powerdives in response to hunting bats, thereby reducing their ability to evade predation
Summary
Lighting contributes 1900 million tonnes of CO2 to the Earth’s atmosphere annually [1]. In 2009, approximately onethird of UK street lights were due to be upgraded [2], mainly from mercury vapour (MV) and sodium lights to energy-saving technologies such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs). While this may reduce global energy consumption, these lights are being installed en masse without adequate research to establish their effects on human health and wildlife [2,3,4]. Many insects have tympanic ears to detect predatory bats [14], ultraviolet (UV)-emitting, broad-spectrum MV street lights reduce a moth’s likelihood of
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