Make you Fink on Friday

Street lights ‘changing ecology on the ground’

The study could have big implications for a shifting of the ecology in urban and suburban areas

The presence of street lights substantially changes the ecology of ground-dwelling invertebrates and insects, research suggests.

Scientists trapped nearly 1,200 of the animals in areas under and between street lights in Helston in Cornwall.

They report in Biology Letters that invertebrate predators and scavengers were more common near the lights, even during the day.

That suggests street lights influence ecology more than previously thought.

Much work in recent years has gone into addressing the effects that street lights can have on local, transient populations of bugs – particularly those that can fly and have significant ranges of exploration.

But the effects of street lights on the vast communities of invertebrates on the ground remained unaddressed.

Source: BBC News Read more

Opinion:

There, just another example of man’s guilt at changing the nature of things.

Everything man does, has an adverse effect on the environment.

Bugs under street light photo time-lapse photography

Now, on the surface, we may not think that altering the habitats of ‘bugs’ is that important. But what if a particular ‘bug’ was required to prey on another particular ‘bug’ and one was and the other wasn’t attracted to light. Then the ‘bug’ that was controlled is now free of predators to swarm and multiply so that it becomes a noxious pest, possibly to the detriment of mankind.

There exist also possibilities of street lights being the cause of extinction. Fireflies, for example, prefer street lights to sex, because the street lights are brighter than the signal light for sex from their own species.