Last night as I was at a friend’s place preparing to insert a DVD into the computer, I noticed a fly in the apartment. He has one of those 300 watt halogen lamps that shine light straight upwards, and for some reason, bugs are irresistably drawn to this lightbulb, which reaches several hundred degrees during use.
This particular fly I tried to thwart by swatting around the lamp with the DVD case to dissuade it, but the more I protested, the more eager to get to the light it became. Eventually, it fley into the bulb for a moment, got a ligt burn, flew right out, straight into my eye, and then right back up into the light again, where it died in a matter of about a second in a furious buzzing noise…
I hate that, because the flies will literally burn with a heavy smoke, and it is rather sickening to smell, breath, and taste…
Why do the bugs go to this light? In this case, the fly got injured the first time, but still went back for more.
Is it the halogen bulb?
Flying insects exhibit strong phototropisms. When the strongest sources of light were the Sun and the moon, this worked very well. The insect could navigate by keeping the strongest light source in its visual range at a constant angle, thus flying straight for however long a bug flies.
Artificial lights short-circuit this adaptative behaviour. Because the apparent position of the light source changes with small movements of the insect, the poor critters fall into a logarithmic death spiral and burn themselves on a light their ancestors never reached.
Interesting…
Y’know, when I was a kid I used to think that the reasons there was no moths during the day was that they were all trying to get to the sun and were thus too high up to see.
he he he
That’s the principle of the bug zappers. I just wish the bugs around here were a bit more intelligent and head for the bug zapper instead of flying all over the place except there. maybe they are blind or dumb or something. In the end I have to swat them by traditional means.
Flies dying by cremation in a halogen lamp? Never seen that, but did manage to get something larger (a beetle of some sort) to fly into the one in my room. I could see just the top of the lamp, so I was mightily impressed when the bug buzzed angrily (briefly), then started smoking, then erupted into incandescence for about a second or so, with a nice bright red flame. It was kind of cool, and it definitely got the job done–bug certainly stopped bothering me after that. It think it was basically vaporized after a couple more minutes, or at least fully cremated.