December 2024: Patterns of Activity.

This month, host Bill McGeeney is joined by Travis Longcore, Adjunct Professor and Co-Chair of the Environmental Science and Engineering Program at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and Paul Bogard,  author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award!

See Full Show Notes, Lighting Tips and more at LightPollutionNews.com. Like this episode, share it with a friend!

Bill's Picks:

• It’s Almost Halloween. That Means It’s Time for a Bat Beauty Contest, KQED Arts, KQED.

• The moon’s influence on the activity of tropical forest mammals, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 

• Shedding light with harmonic radar: Unveiling the hidden impacts of streetlights on moth flight behavior, PNAS. 

• Archaeologists Explore Life After Dark in the Ancient Night, Nancy Gonlin and April Nowell, Atlas Obscura. 

• light pollution more light FRIGHT pollution (for best effect please read this sentence on all hallow's eve), Qwantz.com. 

Chapters

• 28:38 Nocturnal Animal Behavior and Light Pollution
• 38:24 Seabirds Vulnerable to Artificial Light

Transcript

Bill McGeeney: 0:07

light pollution news, december 2024 patterns of activity. This episode what would cause the moon to drive up instances of roadkill? We take a look at how some past cultures engaged with the night, and is it really light pollution or is it fright pollution? This month, I'm very excited to be joined by two people. You probably need no introduction for Dr Travis Longcore and author Mr Paul Bocard A new Light Pollution News.

Bill McGeeney: 0:53

I'm your host, bill McGeaney, excited as always to have you joining us as we explore the stories in the news relating to the topic of light pollution. Light Pollution For you, new to the show. Light Pollution News is a twice-monthly show where I bring on three great guests to help walk you and me walk myself through the month's news. Light Pollution News aims to build engagement and conversation around the topics of light pollution and further grow awareness to help us make the best decisions for a better tomorrow. Be that, we're at the time of year again where we look back before we look forward. I want to just do a quick round of thanks. I want to thank you, the listener, for being with us this year. I especially want to thank you if you're a supporter of light pollution news. You literally make it feasible for us to put together this show each and every month. Supporters of the show have helped significantly in helping us to be able to be where we are, so thank you once more. I truly appreciate all listeners. Speaking from all three of us here at Light Pollution News, thank you so much for helping us. Thank you for helping us help you to be informed every two weeks or thereabout. Finally, let's quickly divvy through some administrative stuff. If you're listening, be sure to subscribe via whatever podcast player that you're listening to. If you're listening from our website, thank you. You can subscribe to the show via the links and the audio player on a page that you're listening to. So, once more, thank you. You're all amazing. You're really the best listeners anyone can ask for.

Bill McGeeney: 2:20

Now it's time for the last recorded couple of shows of 2024. What a year it's been, from my rollercoaster election season here in the US to the Dodgers Travis Dodgers winning the World Series, auroras Comets, full solar eclipse, so celebrate. I have a couple of guests here that help us guide us through this last episode. This has been such a unique year as I introduce my guests because I kind of want to do something a little different here. I was wondering if you guys can tell me just your favorite moment of 2024. And you know, it could be anything, it could be, you know. Say if someone had a special, significant moment in their life, or if you were able to catch the aurora, you know, underneath the Milky Way somewhere. So first up, I want to introduce both my guests. They're people. I've always looked up to First one here. Travis Longcore, there, people, I've always looked up to First one here.

Bill McGeeney: 3:06

Travis Longcore, you were one of the few presentations I called live for Under One Sky. You guys you, avalon and Aipa put together a great presentation there. One thing that I think people probably don't recognize that you pointed out in your talk is that you are a geographer. And how on earth did a geographer ever get? Because you went through the ranks all the way up to a phd in geography. How'd you even? How'd you ever get to ecology? Or is this common practice? Is this just a different wing of using your tools to to provide assessment here?

Travis Longcore: 3:38

great question. Thanks for having me on. Geographers do more than memorize state capitals. In fact, we don't memorize state capitals, and there is a part of geography known as biogeography sort of the science of where things are and how they got there and so I was in that area in my PhD.

Travis Longcore: 4:01

Catherine Rich, my wife now and then partner, was interested in this topic, and she's the one who got going on it in a geography department and looking for, you know, hey, isn't there something here where we'd like the world to hold up for other species and they can't get away from it? That's a problem. And so that's how I got in, and we did a lot of work on this together, including writing a bridge lighting project that connected us up then with the astronomical community and the International Dark Sky Association. We then pulled together at the sort of behest of the president of the International Dark Sky Association at the time. Bob gent wanted a white paper on wildlife and and light because he was having a hard time convincing people. That was a real thing, and so we're like I'm not sure we can do any better than the ones that are out there, but we had the idea of pulling together a conference that we held in 2002. It turned into a paper, turned into a book and the rest is history, as they say.

Travis Longcore: 5:06

But geographers, there's a couple of ways that geography comes into this. One is that a lot of the work is remote sensing, so satellite use, measuring lights, and remote sensing is sort of firmly within the discipline of geography. And the other is that geographers tend to also have a healthy part of the discipline that's concerned about place and not just place from a quantitative mapping perspective, but the idea of place is something that's consistent with the sort of the more humanistic or social science side of geography as well really good way to put it.

Bill McGeeney: 5:51

I think a lot of people don't realize how much place matters. Right, and you mentioned back initially doing a. It was a project on bridge lighting, right? Have you seen changes in public awareness on ecology and light pollution? Just, it's been what? 20 years span?

Travis Longcore: 6:08

yeah, I mean certainly there's a different level of awareness. I mean it's the point now where you can get a a listicle type article in smithsonian, like people like, oh yeah, this is a thing, and here's 11, you know 11 crazy things that you know, like that's a wildlife. So that's a far cry from when we got started. In fact, she was, you know, looking into this even before we ended up fighting this bridge project and early internet. I'll just say, you know, maybe not early internet, but early worldwide web. We were doing searches around the time when we were putting together the conference you know, which happened in 2002, publishing the paper Ecological Light Pollution, which came a little after that, and those words ecological light pollution had not been put together and indexed on the World Wide Web at that point and you had to work to find them.

Travis Longcore: 7:02

Now, the things that were there were very clearly the topic areas that we know go back decades and centuries Attraction of birds to lighthouses. That was all there, but the sort of synthetic piece. It would be difficult to go anywhere but more awareness from that time. People knew maybe about turtles, and that, of course, remains important. They knew about bird attractions, the lights and and the coelometers, which is a big thing in the mid 1900s in the us the lights that shine up from an airport to see how low the clouds are. They've changed that technology.

Travis Longcore: 7:38

But when those first were introduced in the, you know, world war ii era, you know they killed a lot of birds and there was a lot of people writing about that and communication towers doing the same things as now 1,000, 2,000 foot towers out there and people made the connection. But the level of awareness of things beyond the dead bodies on the ground I refer to those turtles and birds and insects that's really come in the last 20 years. There's still a lot long ways to go. I find you talk to people and it's just new to them and that surprises me to some degree because now it's so familiar. But there's still a lot of awareness that has to happen.

Bill McGeeney: 8:21

I wouldn't think that most of the people I speak to, at least here in Philadelphia, if it's in the public side they have no idea about the ecological piece. So I don't know how messaging is typically dispersed in professions, but maybe that's within a particular bureaucracy or profession engineering side that they wouldn't actually see this until maybe relatively recently, like the last five or 10 years. If you're growing up in that profession, you wouldn't actually see the ecological effectiveness. Perhaps it's interesting because I know you've been at it for a long time. There's a lot of documentation. Talking with friends over at the Audubon Society, they mentioned the same thing 100 years back. You know right here in Center City how they lit up the city hall and how birds were just flying into it and you know that's well documented. But it feels like you have to remind people constantly of these facts. You know when we do a Lights Out it's constantly re-education, right.

Travis Longcore: 9:18

Yeah, and it's not just about lights. People are constantly rediscovering things that have been known and maybe putting a slightly finer point on it. But there's a tendency to think of science as being cumulative, so that you're always just building on what was done before. But there is a degree of and David Ehrenfeld, a conservation biologist, wrote an essay about this. It's one of our favorites here. There's a degree of forgetting that goes on of. And david ehrenfeld, uh, concentration biologists wrote an essay about this. There's one of our favorites here called there's a degree of forgetting that goes on.

Travis Longcore: 9:49

You'd think that that you know, it's just like this organized, you know march of knowledge. And it's not that people forget things. They don't find them in the literature. They they investigate something and say I found this new thing, when really it's the same thing somebody found 40 years ago, just with a different language or maybe in a different system.

Travis Longcore: 10:10

There is a, there's a lot more to it than just you know building, block after block after block, but rather the sort of the cultural, the broad cultural awareness and also the, I think, on the solution side, the, the mores that go along with doing things better, right in terms of waste and and and respect for places.

Travis Longcore: 10:33

I think you know, you think about growing up. It would have been just absolutely an abomination the idea that we would leave our outdoor lights on overnight unless we were expecting somebody to show up in the middle of the night. Right, you just didn't do that. And I grew up in a you know smallish town in maine, and you know it becomes a cultural thing and that changes over time. And now, because it's so cheap to light, people put these things out there. Oh, it doesn't cost anything. Well, it's still disrespectful to your both to your neighbors and to nature and the sky and everything else, and it's a cultural shift that hopefully we can guide if we, if we put enough of them out there, we get back up to the price point we used to be at.

Bill McGeeney: 11:18

But you know that's a conversation for a different day, I think. But I think you hit on something here. I know some people are nervous about the future. Other people are celebrating the future, specifically as it relates to ecological protections here in the US. Probably the first time since FDR or Teddy Roosevelt do we have a potential for a vast rethinking of the American ethos here. With Donald Trump as his second term, I don't think it's too US-centric to say that as we go, the rest of the world, or at least many other people in the world countries, will follow. Do you think that a major shift in US policy will impact the progress in promoting responsible, community-friendly lighting?

Travis Longcore: 11:58

Well, it's unclear to me what the new administration is going to do about lighting specifically, what the new administration is going to do about lighting specifically. However, the party and its leader have a pretty clearly anti-regulatory perspective and an anti-conservation perspective, by which I mean sort of energy conservation. This is not a well and, to be fair, it's not like the other party was out there saying we need to limit our energy consumption either. Let's be clear we have two parties that are built on perpetual growth and growth in energy consumption and economic growth.

Travis Longcore: 12:37

I think there's lots of people around the world who are working on this now and from their own context, and it's different in different places.

Travis Longcore: 12:45

So, for example, you know there are places in the world where light is this you know, light at night is a signifier of economic and social development. And the minute you say, well, no lights, and it's like, well, I know, but that's how I can get educated, you know, that's how I can, you know, have it's a signifier of, of having the social structure of connection to a world economy that that can pull one out of of of grim or circumstances. And then, on the other, you know the extreme other end, you know life is, can be also be a signifier, I think, in in the developed world, of just profligacy, you know, lack of of caring for things other than legacy. You know lack of of caring for things other than than one's own satisfaction, beyond, beyond needs. I don't think that this administration is going to change the way the world thinks about life pollution. It's going to cause problems, many problems that we could go into, but I think that's another podcast.

Bill McGeeney: 13:40

Okay, well, hey, how about your favorite one with 2024? You have to have some great story. Yeah, I'll give you two. Well, personally, how about your favorite moment of 2024?

Travis Longcore: 13:45

You have to have some great story. Mine, yeah, I'll give you two. Personally, I had a great trip to Maine to visit my parents and was able to give a talk about the history of ecological light pollution 20 years on at the University of Maine. So that was exciting for me to go back and give a talk on the campus that I kind of ran around as a kid, before I had a driver's license of my bike, you know, and that was like my backyard, so that was kind of that was kind of fun.

Travis Longcore: 14:12

The other sort of interesting thing we had a night monitoring the light conditions around a overpass, the wildlife being constructed here in Southern California, and one of the nights my students and I were out. We didn't see it with our naked eye, but it was a pretty massive aurora and we processed the imagery afterwards in Los Angeles, not too far from the very, very bright San Fernando Valley. We actually had half of our image showing up pink, pink and purple from the aurora that we were able to capture with a the long exposure of a sky quality camera. So that was actually, from you know, this perspective, a pretty exciting thing to to be able to, to have documented that well so I assume you've probably seen the aurora before.

Bill McGeeney: 15:01

Yeah, yeah, but the students was first time. I mean they just, even if it was a picture they took that's yeah, yeah.

Travis Longcore: 15:07

Well, I take it back because some of the students had been on a research trip to idaho the summer before and as part of another project that I have with the boise state and and the central idaho dark sky, and so they had actually seen it before, but none of us obviously had seen it in LA and really we only saw it in quotes once we looked at the long exposure imagery.

Bill McGeeney: 15:35

Yeah, it's hard to decipher in a light-polluted area actually, because it kind of looks like light pollution. That's what I found All right. So, travis, I really appreciate you coming on. We'll get into the official news in a second. I know you just got over COVID, so if he sounds kind of weird folks you know, hey, I'm working through a cold. Travis is feeling a little better. And Paul, how are you feeling? Any personal affliction with you tonight, is there?

Paul Bogard: 15:59

My wife and daughter are sick, so it may be coming for me, but so far I'm okay.

Bill McGeeney: 16:05

Well, I'm very grateful to have you, paul, here, looking back at how some things work out through for me personally. You know you, mr Paul Bogart. You wrote a book that really incited me to act and I think there was an emotional connection in that book just your prose and how you developed a story around the night and our relationship with the night. I think that many people, probably many people who are listening right now, actually have, I think, some parts of that. So I want to thank you for that and we're going to give you the second half where you can start talking about some of the cool things that you're doing. Paul, do I need to do a full introduction here? I feel, like most people you know, associate professor of English and environmental studies at Hamlet university, notable writer how many best selling books.

Paul Bogard: 16:53

Dozens? Yeah, I think. Depending on how you count, I have five or six books and another one on the way, which we can talk about later, and and so I've been fortunate to be able to publish some work.

Bill McGeeney: 17:06

We've done the hard work to get it there too. So, hey, Paul, what's your favorite moment of 2024?

Paul Bogard: 17:11

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this, obviously, since you were asking, Travis, I think you know, from a sky perspective, I was in Colorado, in the Pawnee National, grasslands, maybe a month ago and with Kyle Horton, who's done amazing work with the radar, you know, watching birds, nocturnal migration and that kind of thing, and so that was cool just to be out there. But then the aurora that night were just amazing and just kind of that experience of rose, red, green, different colors, just you know, just everything you dream of. It was pretty, pretty great. And then also, you know, selling the contract, getting a contract to write the next book happened this year, which is just a very wonderful thing for me that I worked really hard to get. So that was, that was a huge event for me.

Bill McGeeney: 17:59

So congratulations, thanks, and you're able to see the colors right when you're out there visually.

Paul Bogard: 18:06

Yeah, it's, it was really. I mean, I've, I've, I've seen. I don't know if I've seen the Northern Lights anywhere but Minnesota before Northern Minnesota. So it's kind of neat to see him in Colorado and I don't feel like I've actually seen the kind of rose, pink, you know, red lights like we saw this time. Uh, before I think I've mostly seen green and kind of brownish, you know that kind of color, so it's neat to see the other colors.

Bill McGeeney: 18:32

Well, before we begin tonight, I have one editorial correction to make. Last month we spoke about blue walkers. Well, appears that I was tangled up in blue and misspoke. The blue birds were launched up by ast in september 2024. These are the studio, apartment-sized satellites in orbit currently. Apologize for any confusion, and maybe you can wave to them next time they pass by.

Bill McGeeney: 18:53

So let's kick things off with ecology, and this is a warm-up here. My wife and I actually dabbled in little knock-making and I know you're just talking about Kyle Horton and doing the radar. Knock-making for you at home is simply when you put a microphone, essentially aim it to the sky so you can listen to bird migrations, pass through your night, and when you do this, you also get much more, including a rich perspective on the lives of squirrels. The occasional screech owl fox calls, the noise of deer crunching on dead leaves and, of course, raccoon squabbles. It wouldn't be a night without raccoon squabbles. This story is along a similar line. A lady by the name of Danae Wolfe set up a bird feeder camera and bird feeder cameras, which have become quite popular as of late. She actually captured raccoon, family turkeys flying squirrel and deer all at night. So I'm curious if any of you have any interesting creature encounters that you've seen or heard at night?

Travis Longcore: 19:49

Yeah, so we have a trail cam on our outside our house. We live in a Canyon in the Santa Monica mountains, which is the mountain range, and so the cuts through the middle of Los Angeles and separates the West side of LA from the San Fernando Valley. And we get occasionally bobcat on the camera, so that's always kind of fun with us. Of course the birds too, but the bobcat's a special one.

Paul Bogard: 20:14

Yeah, we had otters at our cabin in northern Minnesota this year. They're probably around every year but we don't see them every year and we didn't see them this year. But we saw their. Their poop was all over our dock and then one night I heard them out in the front yard and that was kind of fun. Never again, never saw. I need to get a nighttime camera for the by the lake, but you know they're there.

Bill McGeeney: 20:39

That's good to hear. Obviously, we don't see that much stuff in the city here, but we see a fair amount of animals, all the ones I mentioned. So otters sound great, and the cats out there, travis, it's not rare to see the cats, or is it?

Travis Longcore: 20:53

But the bobcat I mean, if you're in the right place you'll see them, but more often you've got to be next to some natural habitat for the bobcats. Coyotes are pretty much everywhere. People see them throughout the city. They live in the city and then there's also mountain lions. I've never seen them myself, but we had a rather famous one hanging out in Griffith Park for a while. It became a bit of an icon of conservation here in Southern California.

Bill McGeeney: 21:21

Well, how about this? How about and Travis, you spoke before about how light can actually talk. You know, an area that has a lot of artificial light at night may actually have a little more economic impact and maybe a mode for progression. How about this? What if the level of light pollution could help you determine your credit worthiness? Researchers in Journal of Operations Research posited that through the use of a nighttime light intensity variable, a population distribution density variable, a land use identification variable and an efficiency measure for the use of water, that they could feasibly improve a credit score model by assessing individual living in rural northern China. The authors of the paper believe that these variables actually outperformed other macroeconomic factors to build a more viable rating for the folks living there. A nighttime light intensity variable trying to say how much light is actually in that community, or in that, I guess that farm.

Travis Longcore: 22:23

Look, I mean, this is just an extension of that example of lights indicating economic activity, and a place that has economic activity is more likely to have people who have, in this instance, money. And there's a whole side of geographic research about global economies that uses night lighting as the indicator of economic activity. Now, of course, we would balk at that here in the US, because any sort of scheme like this sort of falls prey to the ecological fallacy, which is that just because a thing is in a place, that it has the attributes of the place basically. So it is not an individualistic prediction, but a spatial one, and that means there will be people within that area who are improperly categorized, and I think that our individualistic nature in the US wouldn't be too happy about that. We're like no, no, collect data about me specifically. Really, as a matter of fact, I'll give it to you on my devices In a sort of a developing economy perspective, without the same sort of attitudes about privacy and data and whatnot, this makes complete sense.

Bill McGeeney: 23:35

I wonder how much of that's, because there are many other ways you can. Maybe there's. Yeah, you don't have that accessibility that we have. You know, you think about, we kind of take stuff for granted here, right, like it's easier to to see a customer or a person's spending trends and you have all that transparency and whatnot. You're looking for a creative, you're looking for ways to assess the creditworthiness.

Travis Longcore: 23:54

Seems logical to me yeah, but other places in places in the world, we take for granted that there's electricity and there's lights and that there's internet and all this sort of thing. And, of course, mobile phones around the world have transformed information availability, but electrification is not everywhere. This is why this is a complicated issue.

Bill McGeeney: 24:13

Well, it wasn't that long ago that we were all fine-tuning our Halloween costumes. Here's a fun little awareness campaign from the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming. They put on this campaign to bring attention to the spookiest mammals out there, which, of course, are bats. Bats which, per BLM, consume upwards of 2,000 to 6,000 moths, beetles, flies and mosquitoes and have engaged in an annual beauty contest since 2019, akin to Fat Bear Week. For you listener who does not reside in North America, fat Bear Week is a week run by Katmai National Park and Preserve, whereby they bring awareness and attention to grizzly bears by doing pretty much what we're going to talk about here. Well, in this case, plm runs a social media campaign that encourages participants to vote for their favorite bat.

Bill McGeeney: 24:59

Similar to Fat Bear Week, each contestant has a humorous name Eventually came down to two bats Horry Potter and Iguano of Fire, a Horry bat from Oregon, and Honey Bunches of Myotis, a play on the serial Honey Bunches of Oats. Another name which I personally is fond of Sir Flaps-a-Lot, a Townsend's big-eared bat. Unlike popular misconceptions spurred by cultural misgivings, less than 1% of all bat populations carry rabies, according to Emma Busk over at BLM Wildlife Technician. Pretty interesting way of building awareness for some of these creatures that we rarely see. I assume all of you guys have bats in your neighborhoods.

Travis Longcore: 25:41

Yeah, and there's a great thing in the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles County where they've had an initiative to go out and measure, detect bats using bat detectors, which are basically recorders that take the ultrasonic sound and then you can hear it down in the human hearing register.

Travis Longcore: 26:01

And going into neighborhoods that don't necessarily think that they have a lot of nature, but the truth is they're pretty much everywhere and so you can start to connect people to nature in a way at night and with bats that is less accessible in the day when you look around and it maybe looks like a concrete wasteland, but in fact you start measuring and trying to make some of these unseen things seen and you can educate people about the sort of ecosystem that is persisting around them to some degree. Maybe it's not the numbers or the diversity of species that you would find other places, but there's bats everywhere and that's a really cool thing. And there's research going on. There's a postdoc at UCLA now who's trying to do some quantification of lighting levels in three dimensions, looking at, using drones and things like that, to figure out how the lighting is affecting bat behavior in 3D, which is kind of fascinating.

Bill McGeeney: 27:01

Yeah, because there's different types of bats. It's open, I guess, to be in and around light-polluted areas, right, think of Houston, where they have different signs for the bat outcrops and whatnot, in the heart of the city.

Travis Longcore: 27:12

Yeah, yeah, so I mean just to be clear the best thing for all of these species is natural nighttime. Yeah, so I mean just to be clear the best thing for all of these species is natural nighttime. So just as a precursor to this observation, however, there are some bat species that are more comfortable than others foraging at the insects that are attracted to lights. And it has to do.

Bill McGeeney: 27:41

We believe, with their sort of assessment of the risk of being predated, attacked by an owl or something like that. Well, along that line, we have an interesting study from Transportation Research, Part D, Transport and Environment, which looked at an interesting case of wildlife vehicular collisions on full moon nights. The study assessed both wildlife collisions and non-wildlife collisions in rural and urban areas within the state of Texas during January of 2011 through to January of 2020, which is roughly 112 lunar cycles if you're counting. It found that there was a 46% uptick in wildlife vehicle collisions during a full moon, opposed to new moon nights in rural areas. The difference was less pronounced in urban areas and there was no significant correlation between moon phases and non-wildlife vehicular collisions. However, interestingly, the author summarizes the cause of the increase in collisions to have come from drivers being more complacent with greater levels of environmental illumination. What do you guys think on that assumption?

Travis Longcore: 28:40

I think that idea that they explored is probably not the right answer. They elsewhere in the paper. So my students and I read this paper this week. So the elsewhere in the paper they talk about that. They're just not going to get into speculation about the animal behavior side of this because they're not ecologists and I think the answer lies in the animal behavior side as opposed to the human awareness side. And that's because my bet is that most of these collisions that get reported are going to be deer, either white-tailed or mule deer. Going to be deer, either white-tailed or mule deer. And I mean just kind of logically, because there's so many more of them than other big things. And people aren't going to report wildlife vehicle collisions for squirrels and mice and other sort of prey items, right? So we can probably assume it's. Maybe it's some coyotes, maybe it's occasional boccat or something, but Texas armadillo, you know, but probably the majority of that is going to be deer and deer.

Travis Longcore: 29:42

Have you know lunar patterns in activity? And even though we think of species that are active at night, usually humans were just like, oh, that's night and so it's dark, and we forget that there's orders of magnitude difference in lighting conditions between a full moon and most of the rest of the time, and there are patterns of activity and behaviors and foraging and whatnot that are cued to those lunar cycles. For some species it's to avoid the full moon because it's more dangerous, like kangaroo, rats and deer, mice and things like that. They're much more vulnerable to being detected by a predator when it's brighter. However, other species they are willing to use the light and I have a feeling that's what's going on with the deer and there's some work we've done in California and there's other work that was done on I'm going to forget who did it, but it's sort of the whole intermountain region on the distribution of mountain lions and deer as their main prey.

Travis Longcore: 30:58

The light polluted urban areas a little bit more and the mountain lions are, like it, a little bit darker and when they go into the lighter areas they're getting the deer at the darker areas within the sort of urban area. There's a lot to unpack there, but my bet is what's going on here is that deer are just more active during the full moon because they're seeing better and and they're they tend to be in groups and and prey species that are in groups use light a little bit more and are more predisposed to being around light because they can see predators a little bit better. So you think example the school of fish right, if you reduce the light in in a tank at a certain point, the fish stop schooling and they spread out. But you add the light and then they school because there's a communal defense when you've got the the light.

Bill McGeeney: 31:45

And so this is what I think is probably going on here, and we could, you know, write a letter to the authors of the journal and say, hey, here's an idea, let's, let's, let's investigate that you hit on a perfect point, right, because there's an article that came out roughly around the same time from the Proceedings of Royal Society B, where researchers looked at 86 mammal species living in 17 protective forests across three continents using long-term camera data, and they found that 12 of them had a strong aversion to activities in moonlight, while three of them were strongly attracted to operating in moonlight, 30% avoided full moons, while 20% of them eagerly embraced doing activity during full moons. And they confirmed to your point the crepuscular nature of deer made them more active during a lit night than a darker new moon night.

Travis Longcore: 32:37

Yeah, so this is exactly this point and it's well known. And it also lets us say something from the light pollution perspective about thresholds and the impacts of light pollution. So if you look at the previous paper you were just talking about, they found that the new moon didn't increase collisions in urban areas. Why is that? Because they're already bright enough that the deer are going to probably have a flattened out activity pattern because there's like moonlight all the time, right, whereas that pattern that you talked about was, in the rural areas, a much more cyclical pattern probably, of deer activity.

Travis Longcore: 33:10

And this then tells us from a thresholds perspective because some of all y'all who work in the light pollution field deal with proposals for development and it tells you that the light that's produced by a full moon is ecologically relevant, as is not having the light of the full moon. And how bright is that? Well, it's a tenth of a lux or two tenths of a lux, and sometimes, when you see environmental review documents, they'll be like oh well, there's less than a lux of light and therefore there's no environmental impact. 10 times brighter than the full moon, which we know itself is two orders of magnitude brighter than maybe a quarter moon. So this information about lunar patterns is everything that you need to know in order to be able to go into an environmental impact context and set some thresholds that are actually much lower than what the lighting engineers and environmental scientists in the past have asserted is a low threshold, and we've shown this as well with some of the work we've done on beaches in California and lighting levels.

Bill McGeeney: 34:18

That's a really interesting point. I didn't realize it was much lower. I always thought it was a marginal amount, but okay.

Travis Longcore: 34:26

Yeah, order of magnitude.

Bill McGeeney: 34:29

Well, travis, you'll be right home with this one as well. So it was a marginal amount, but okay, yeah, order of magnitude less. Well, travis, you'll be right home with this one as well. A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences utilized harmonic radar to track flight behavior of 95 moths up to one kilometer from release point. Each moth was outfitted with a 12-millimeter long antenna. Only 4% of the moths actually flew towards the streetlights, which painted the picture that moths actually avoided streetlights and continued to act in aversion to streetlights, which ended up fragmenting moth habitat. Do you know anything about that?

Travis Longcore: 35:01

Yeah, so this is. I think the lead author on this is Jacqueline in Germany and a whole crew from Germany that did this work. First of all, let's just take a moment and recognize the sort of technological breakthrough that it is to affix a tiny little radar antenna to a moth and track what was the number? They had A bunch of moths.

Bill McGeeney: 35:26

It was 95 moths. Yeah, 95 moths they yeah, 95 moths actually kilometer yeah, actually radar track 95 moths at night. This is like super cool stuff, right how do you, how do you fix that to a moth like how light these have to be super light.

Travis Longcore: 35:44

Tiny little bit of glue, yeah, okay. So so there's. There's the sort of just the hey, this is really cool. But also it gives us this new sort of picture and you can pair it with the paper that came out not too long ago about how moths are attracted to lights because they're orienting their their dorsal surface to the light and that sort of guides them in a circle that then is to the light. So it sort of explains how they end up flapping around lights because they're trying to orient themselves to it like it's the sky basically. So you take those two things and put them together.

Travis Longcore: 36:21

What the Deegan paper is showing us is that our impacts aren't just those insects that are attracted to the lights, it's the ones that are basically not attracted to the lights, that are being kept from going places that they would otherwise go because of the lights reducing the gene flow, reducing pollination services, all this sort of thing. And so, if we think about it, we've calculated there are, you know, the number of insects killed at lights in a year in certain areas of the world, which is just this staggering number. But there's now, if, if this holds, you know true, over subsequent work, which I expect that it would. There's a magnitude more that are being impacted behaviorally that we're not seeing, you know, and so really, really interesting paper, both technologically and for what it means for how these impacts have and how we measure.

Bill McGeeney: 37:14

Yeah, 2024, big year for moths. Really interesting stuff. And we had an article on a couple months back of a guy who showed you how to actually photograph and how to trap them, to actually kind of take inventory, I guess, of the moth population around you, which is pretty neat. So we're going to run through a couple of quick bird ones here, and so first off we have one that's probably not too much of a surprise, given it's a urban house finches. House finches seem to be pretty adaptable. They appear to be pretty resilient in the face of light pollution. This comes from science of total environment, where it's found that urban house finches really aren't doing too bad. They didn't appear to have increased stress hormones under artificial light at night, but rural house finches that didn't live in the same environment did. Perhaps as a parallel to the increased stress, rural birds also showed a greater increase in the levels of an intestinal parasite that's common to finches than the rate of growth for that same parasite in urban birds when affected by artificial light at night. Both birds suffered through sleep deprivation in a light, but urban birds suffered less than the rural birds. So that's an interesting one. And then let me get through this and I'll throw it back to you. Travis From the Journal of Experiment of experimental biology, researchers took a look at the shorebird corey's shearwater.

Bill McGeeney: 38:32

Namely, the researchers noted that the seabirds are under the most threat from human activity and one of those threats obviously derives from light pollution given. Obviously, the authors noted that when breeding ends, thousands of burrow nesting seabird fledglings fall to the ground in urban areas after encountering light pollution. The fledglings look to be trapped in the light. So this study took a look to see if white or blue light was simply more dangerous than other forms of light for these birds, and Corey Shearwater fledglings delayed the decision-making in environments with artificial light at night and appear to be avoiding a blue light Once they're exposed to light, the birds became disoriented and trapped.

Bill McGeeney: 39:16

It should be noted that the study was a study of 131 individuals, whereby 20 of them self-selected to go towards darkness and six self-selected to go towards light chavs. You have any thoughts on either of those ones, especially the house finch? One's an interesting one. I think it makes a parallel to what you were talking about before with the moon. In this case we have two of the same bird species, but one that's living in that environment that has that 24-7 daylight yeah, right, I mean they're both about birds but they're kind of about different things, right.

Travis Longcore: 39:45

So the? So the first one, the first paper, and that's Pierce Hutton, I think, from Arizona State, part of his PhD work that's about the physiological impacts, circadian rhythm impacts, sort of internal health, and the Shearwater one is about attraction, right so movement at night at a particular part in the life cycle. So there's sort of two different phenomena that are being investigated, mechanisms, if you want to think about it that way. The interesting thing, the house finch study is really interesting in that they're basically showing acclimation to light pollution, in that birds that are living under light pollution aren't as disturbed in their sleep as much. It seems kind of familiar.

Travis Longcore: 40:28

I think there are probably people who are used to living out in the countryside and have real dark, quiet nights, and people are used to living in the city and you expose them to some experimental. It's like I bet you, the people in the city, would do a better job at catching a little extra sleep when they've got some lights in their eyes. So that's acclimation. The study doesn't go to the next step of whether or not that is a genetically inherited trait which has been shown for attraction to light in moths. One species of moth in Europe has been shown to have actually inherited difference in its attraction to light in cities, but the sort of urban birds are better at catching up on a few extra winks and offset some of the stress of light at night is a fascinating finding there.

Bill McGeeney: 41:21

Yeah, I'd say Okay, let's move off of the top of ecology travis. Thank you so much it's been. We cover a lot of ecology on the show. It is probably about up to one-fourth, sometimes one-third of the show and that was the most detailed explanation and I think it opens up a lot of eyes and connects the dots really for a lot of people listening. So let's move on to a more of a cultural one. I'm going to wake paul up here. I think he was snoozing. Here's something interesting. A more of a cultural one. I'm going to wake Paul up here. I think he was snoozing. Here's something interesting.

Bill McGeeney: 41:56

A couple of researchers looked at how various cultures illustrate what night was like across time and cultures. For instance, apparently nighttime in ancient Rome shared much in common with what we see today in our modern cities Loud noises, good food, drunken reverie and, of course, where you have alcohol, you usually have subsequent rowdy criminal behavior. The Mayans saw night as a time for many activities, ranging from hunting to worship. In the Middle East and Oman, ancient farmers watered their crops at night. Polynesians navigate by stars. Interesting habits of humanity at night. I'd like to add one that we don't hear too much about, but it's still relatively apparent, if you ever looked up at your college campus here in the US, 19th century astronomical observatories were included into college football stadiums, whereby physical appearance of the astronomy tools marked the distinguishness of a great university. And so I'm curious do you guys have any good tidbits on how cultures interact with night?

Paul Bogard: 43:00

Tidbits. I was just thinking, you know, as you were talking and I was listening to what Travis was saying, that it is. I'm always impressed that it comes down to kind of this idea that we're so out of touch with night Most of us we don't have. You know, it's one thing to talk about different levels of light and how that impacts different species and stuff like that, but I just keep coming back to the idea like most people have no idea what's going on at night period, let alone, I mean, anything. And it doesn't surprise me that we're just we're recognizing that lesser and lesser amounts of light are impacting wildlife at night. It feels to me like Stephen Lockley, I remember, said this to me from Harvard when I was writing the End of Night and we were talking about the impacts of light on human health and the different kinds of lights and how they affect stuff, and he just kind of like Travis did earlier, just stopped and said you know, bottom line is that artificial light is not good for us at night. Now we're talking about degrees of badness here kind of thing, and I think it's the same with ecology as well. It's just that we're so most of us out of touch with night.

Paul Bogard: 44:10

It's fun to hear stories about past cultures and people being out at night, especially on full moons. You know, people were more, I'm sure, attuned to the moon cycles, you know, so that people would plan their travels or plan their plantings or plan their whatever according to the cycles of the moon. You know travels, or plan their plantings or plan their whatever, according to the cycles of the moon. You know, and I love the idea, that, if I heard you correctly, the sign of an observatory on a college campus is kind of the you know some, a sign of status. I went to a school that did have an observatory and even a million years ago when I was there, it seemed almost, you know, a classical element. Nobody, we weren't really using it for observation anymore, but it's certainly something that rings true for me like a study of the. The night sky seems to me one of the highest. It's full of the highest questions, the most meaningful questions that we ask as a species and that we've again sort of largely lost, lost track of in the modern age chavs.

Bill McGeeney: 45:05

You have any thoughts on that one?

Travis Longcore: 45:06

well, I was just going to tie us back to the lunar cycle thing that Paul was mentioning is that there has been comparison of sleep cycles in places that either have no electricity, limited electricity, or the quintessential comparison group for all university researchers, college freshmen, all university researchers, college freshmen, and the interesting thing is that there is a lunar cycle in sleep duration for all three of those.

Travis Longcore: 45:35

It is the most intense for people with no electricity and a little less for those who do, but there's still one for college students taking psychology classes or biology classes at the University of washington and seattle, which raises the question and it's not resolved yet, of what is that lunar cycle is it? Is it really the light availability, which to me is the obvious thing, but they're not so sure the this is a glacia's group at the University of Washington and they have in their paper about us humans actually being able to feel the tug of the moon on the water in our bodies and that that actually puts this lunar cycle in place. Stay tuned on that one. Which one it is, but I find it hard to believe that there's not a pretty significant light component to it.

Bill McGeeney: 46:32

I guess the obvious question why does it need to be one?

Travis Longcore: 46:35

Yeah, or it could be both. Yeah, sure Right, I mean, why not both, you know yeah.

Bill McGeeney: 46:39

Why are you trying to? It seems pretty obvious to me, and when I travel, right, we're lucky enough that we don't have any light coming into our bedroom. When I travel, I always have to bring a mask because everywhere you go you never have a dark room and there's always some miserable experience whenever you go to a hotel or wherever you're at, because some light's sneaking in and I know it affects my sleep. I can't imagine how light would not play into that from the moon.

Paul Bogard: 47:02

You know it's interesting. I don't think it's too tangential. I'm planning to go to Japan next month and I was looking at a hotel, a place to stay in Kyoto, and looking at the reviews and some of them said we love this place, except that there's no shades on the windows and it was super bright at night because it's on a street. Blah. Hey, you know you have great reviews. I'm thinking of staying with you, but I really have a hard time with light at night. You know, do you have a room that would be darker? And part of their answer was they said and I won't know the name for it right off the bat, but the Japanese tradition of basically not having blinds on the windows but just having the kind of the paper, you know, dividers on the windows or whatever.

Paul Bogard: 47:48

And I I thought immediately, like before, artificial, you know electric light. That would have been made so much sense, right, because you're in tune with the dawn, the dusk, the moonlight, all those things. It would have been really quite beautiful. But now it's sort of like how we put super bright LEDs and gas lamp fixtures kind of thing. Now, the technology for those windows is just outdated, right, and they were never made to block the street signs in Kyoto, kind of thing. So I just thought that was interesting, kind of a window technology or a hotel technology that hasn't caught up with the times, oh wow.

Bill McGeeney: 48:29

Good luck, paul. Well, let's finish up the first half of the show with a little commentary on life. I don't know about you guys.

Bill McGeeney: 48:36

As a kid I remember eagerly reading the comic section of the newspaper. It was the only worthwhile section in my mind, and the internet sometimes rekindles some of those things that society took for granted and some of the things I took for granted. For instance, I love the Far Side, the Far Side comic strip. I'm not sure why I love it. The humor just for some reason connects with me. I don't understand it.

Bill McGeeney: 48:59

So I joined a Facebook Far Side group that shows random Far Side comics each day and I noticed a trend in the comics featuring a nighttime setting comics each day, and I noticed a trend in the comics featuring a nighttime setting. Each one seems to include stars and a moon, or sometimes just the stars in the sky at night. Then, randomly or not randomly, depending on how you feel about the tech industry I saw an ad for another group, but this time it was a Simpsons group, with slides showing an apparent difference between how the Simpsons of the 80s and 90s portrayed night Essentially apparent difference between how the Simpsons of the 80s and 90s portrayed night. Essentially, people were nostalgic about the romantic sky, gradients and quaint nighttime appearance that these show illustrators provided that weren't carried over into the 2000s. So, paul, I know your head is already far ahead of me because this is how your space thinks.

Bill McGeeney: 49:44

I do wonder about what an illustrator would paint today, given the same comic strips. Would there be any stars? Would there be a fading nighttime sky? Would it be a blinking building, colorful building, changing colors? What would we see in that nighttime shot?

Paul Bogard: 50:00

Yeah, I mean it's a great question, and obviously not only with illustrators. But I think of like songs, music. You know if you think of songs from the 40s, obviously speaking just generally. But I think of like songs, music. You know if you think of songs from the 40s, obviously speaking just generally. But the references to walking under the moonlight or with the stars, or paintings Van Gogh, obviously you know just the most famous one. But throughout art the reference to the night sky has been just a common theme.

Paul Bogard: 50:26

And now it would be interesting I don't know if Travis knows any kind of study that's been done, I don't know one. But to go back, has anybody looked at portrayals of the night sky since the turn of the centuries, for example, and to see how it's portrayed or even if it's portrayed. I always kind of chuckle when you hear this phrase all the time, when people, especially like in the summer, people are trying to get people out for events and stuff, and they say, you know, you know, movie under the stars, kind of thing, and I'm like, what are you talking about? You mean like all six of them? You know there's just there is no that we use that phrase, but it's become kind of meaningless at this point.

Travis Longcore: 51:09

Yeah, it's so interesting that you interesting that there's sort of an anachronistic now Language is full of these things. We have all these nautical terms that we use all the time. People have no idea where they come from or what it actually was, and even the animal comparison sly as a fox. How many people today have actually seen a fox do something clever? Have actually seen a fox do something clever? It used to be. Everybody had right, we knew we had a agricultural, you know farm-based, uh, society. Everybody knew how clever foxes were.

Travis Longcore: 51:37

So it's there's, there's definitely a study of man, whether somebody's done it or not. There was a guy who is a light pollution advocate in europe, I think, and he and this is on social media he kind of curated and shared paintings of the night sky from all eras, and so you go back to his feed and I mean, in today's world you could probably even do some sort of AI. You know machine learning, characterization of, you know the prevalence of stars and and and and the night sky and yeah, but there's definitely something lost there in the not understanding what patsy klein was talking about, right?

Bill McGeeney: 52:18

oh sure, yeah yeah, the reason I'm talking about this? Because last month we had a 21 year running comic strip named dinosaur comics that actually looked at the topic of light pollution. If you're not familiar with Dinosaur Comics I wasn't it involves two T-Rexes, the same six frames each release. There's a green one and there's a red T-Rex, and essentially they take witty commentary jabs at each other while ravaging the human environment. Back on October 16th, ryan North, the accomplished author of the strip, took on the topic of light pollution, whereby one dinosaur explains to the other that electric light has removed basically the sky's number one visible feature, and from there it descends into bantering back and forth on modernity. The best part of the comic strip might actually not be the strip itself, but rather the title Light pollution, more like fright pollution, which obviously is an homage to Spooky Season Tale. But I'm going to go a little further on this because I want to put my spin on it. Maybe it's also a double entendre, given that so much light pollution is actually driven from fear and fright.

Bill McGeeney: 53:22

We can stop here for today. We'll pick up the second half of the show in two weeks. I wanted to wait here to the end to actually throw these out there, should you be interested, I recently did a Talkin' Global Star Party. If you're not familiar with that channel, it's a really great YouTube channel that occurs each week. It goes live every Tuesday and then you can follow it on YouTube the next day. I was on 160th Global Star Party. If you've never heard of the show and you're interested in all things space and astronomy, be sure to check it out. It's really a great weekly show. I highly recommend it. It is long but there's so much good material in there. Also, I had a chance to chat with the team over at Podcast Restoring Darkness. You can find that show wherever you find your podcasts.

Bill McGeeney: 54:08

I'd really like to thank my guests today Mr Travis Longcore and Mr Paul Bogart. It's an honor. As a reminder, you at home can join the conversation over at LinkedIn, instagram, facebook, tiktok or even by texting the show right here in the show notes. We record Light Pollution News once a month. This month's recording date is a little early November 16th because we're trying to compress through the holidays. Supporters of the show can join us live as an audience member, where we sometimes have post-show chats with the guests when the recording is done. And thank you once more. Today I'm your host, bill McKinney, reminding you to shine the light only where it's needed. Have a great December, folks. See you in two weeks.