Abstract

Reported declines in insect populations have sparked global concern, with artificial light at night (ALAN) identified as a potential contributing factor. Despite strong evidence that lighting disrupts a range of insect behaviors, the empirical evidence that ALAN diminishes wild insect abundance is limited. Using a matched-pairs design, we found that street lighting strongly reduced moth caterpillar abundance compared with unlit sites (47% reduction in hedgerows and 33% reduction in grass margins) and affected caterpillar development. A separate experiment in habitats with no history of lighting revealed that ALAN disrupted the feeding behavior of nocturnal caterpillars. Negative impacts were more pronounced under white light-emitting diode (LED) street lights compared to conventional yellow sodium lamps. This indicates that ALAN and the ongoing shift toward white LEDs (i.e., narrow- to broad-spectrum lighting) will have substantial consequences for insect populations and ecosystem processes.

Highlights

  • There is growing evidence that some terrestrial insect populations have declined during recent decades [1,2,3], raising concerns about the future functioning of ecosystems [4,5,6,7]

  • There were generally fewer caterpillars in grass margins on transects at almost all sites

  • Tested with a generalized linear mixed-effect model (GLMM), including caterpillar morphotype to account for potential differences in the community composition, the effect was significant for light-emitting diode (LED), mixed for high-pressure sodium (HPS), and nonsignificant for low-pressure sodium (LPS) (P = 0.60)

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Summary

Introduction

There is growing evidence that some terrestrial insect populations have declined during recent decades [1,2,3], raising concerns about the future functioning of ecosystems [4,5,6,7]. Artificial light at night (ALAN) is an increasingly recognized threat to biodiversity and ecosystem processes [21,22,23] and has recently been proposed as a driver of insect declines [24, 25]. Several high-­ profile studies have highlighted the impacts of ALAN on insect pollination [28,29,30,31,32]. It remains unclear whether the effects of ALAN are predominately disruptive impacts on the behavior of individuals or whether ALAN is actively diminishing the populations of pollinators and insect populations more broadly [26, 33]

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