Street lighting: sex-independent impacts on moth movement

1.Artificial lights have become an integral and welcome part of our urban and peri-urban environments. However, recent research has highlighted the potentially negative ecological consequences of ubiquitous artificial light. In particular, insects, especially moths, are expected to be negatively impacted by the presence of artificial lights. Previous research with light traps has shown a male-biased attraction to light in moths. 2.In this study, we sought to determine if street lights could limit moth dispersal and if there was any sex bias in attraction to light. More specifically, we aimed to determine sex specific attraction radii for moths to street lights. 3.We tested these hypotheses by collecting moths for two years at an experimental setup. To estimate the attraction radii we developed a Markov model and related it to the acquired data. 4.Utilizing multinomial statistics, we found that attraction rates to lights in the middle of the matrix were substantially lower than predic...