We finally know why insects are attracted to lights

We finally have a good explanation for why insects gather around artificial lights, and it isn’t because they are attracted to them.

“Our results suggest artificial lights may only trap passing insects rather than attract them directly from farther away,” write Samuel Fabian at Imperial College London and his colleagues in a paper on the bioRxiv preprint server.

Until now, the leading scientific hypothesis has been that insects use the moon’s light to navigate at night and mistake artificial lights …