6 ms·
Makes you wonder if light pollution is wrecking this process.
by sakebomb 8y ago
Makes you wonder if light pollution is wrecking this process.
- jerf 8y agoThere's a lot of orders of magnitude between a light-polluted night and even an overcast day. Your really-quite-good eyes make the difference look much smaller than it really is.
- dymk 8y agoIs it possible that a bee's eyes perform light-level normalization as well? Low-intensity lights/screens (compared to the sun) wreck havoc on our circadian rhythms, it seems plausible that it disrupts the (not just circadian) rhythms of other organisms as well.
- slededit 8y agoAn important question to answer is why this wouldn't be an issue with moonlight.
- dymk 8y agoSure. Perhaps there's something intrinsically different about moonlight - humans don't have their circadian rhythms disrupted by it, like they do with screens and artificial lights.
- Hupriene 8y agoJudging from how hard it can be to sleep during a full moon while camping, I'd say the reason humans aren't generally affected by it is because they sleep underneath opaque shelters that block direct light.
- ivanhoe 8y agoYou need to be out in open and a very dark place, and with very clear skies, to really notice how bright the moonlight can be - in cities it's just not noticeable. Honestly it never affected my sleep since I was usually dead tired from whole day of hiking and I'm not very sensitive to lights anyways, but I remember on more than one occasion that some people in my group complained not being able to fall asleep or about sleeping bad in semi-transparent tents because of super-bright full Moon.
- Nition 8y agoThis is something I've wondered about. People keep talking about how it's blue light that keeps you awake, but moonlight is pretty bluish. Why would humans have evolved to have that as the don't sleep wavelength?
- tylerhou 8y agoMoonlight is white, just like how the sun is white. The moon = blue, sun = yellow connotations are mostly cultural.
- Nition 8y agoJust looked it up. Apparently it's due to the Purkinje Effect, i.e. "The tendency for the peak luminance sensitivity of the human eye to shift toward the blue end of the color spectrum at low illumination levels."
- perl4ever 8y agoI just googled it and apparently moonlight is actually redder (or yellower if you prefer) than sunlight. Here is a thread with a graph of the spectrum: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/244922/why-does-moonlight-have-a-lower-color-temperature/245275 https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/244922/why-does-...
- stephengillie 8y agoNo, it doesn't make me wonder if anthropic lighting is impacting bee flight. If anything, they can fly later at night.
- bluntfang 8y ago>If anything, they can fly later at night. I feel like this is such an American/Capitalist attitude. It's fine! They'll be more efficient and collect more honey!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- labster 8y agoYet another capitalist scheme to make workers work longer hours. I read about it on BuzzFeed.
- stephengillie 8y agoTop 10 Ways To Maximize Anthophilic Output
- andai 8y agoI recently walked through a park at night, and noticed that the deer were still up and about. Then I noticed that all along the enclosure there were bright white street lamps. It struck me then, how inconsiderate this was for the deer.
- pavelrub 8y agoDeer are mostly crepuscular and other than that more active during night time than day time. What you saw likely has little to do with the street lamps.
- andai 8y agoSure, but when are they exposed to darkness? When there's a power outage, which hasn't happened within my lifetime. I'm pretty sure if I had to live with lamps shining on my face all night it would disrupt my circadian rhythm, regardless of when I naturally prefer to sleep.
- pavelrub 8y agoThe point is that deer being active at night isn't an indication of street lamps disrupting their ciradian rhythm. It's possible that those street lamps do affect it, but the behavior you saw isn't evidence of that.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]