 Why are moths attracted to light?
[ 2006-07-12 10:24 ]
漢語中有句成語叫“飛蛾撲火，自取滅亡”。為什么蛾子看到火會不要命的往上撲呢？難道它們傻嗎？還是執行什么殉道儀式？下面這篇文章可以告訴您飛蛾撲火的原因。
 To understand this phenomenon, you need to know aboutphototaxis. It is an organism's automatic movement toward or away from light. Moths arepositively phototactic. They seem charmed by your porch light, your headlights or your campfire. While there is no definitive explanation for this phenomenon, there are some interesting theories.
Some types of moths are known to migrate, and it's possible that the night sky gives them navigational clues. A moth's up-down orientation might depend in part on the brightness of the sky relative to the ground. Somelepidopteristssuggest that moths use the moon as a primary reference point and have the ability tocalibratetheir flight paths as the Earth's rotation causes the moon to move across the sky.
It's also possible that moths have an escape-route mechanism related to light. Imagine disturbing a bush-full of moths at night -- they all fly up and out of the bush, toward the sky. To a moth in danger, flying toward the light tends to be a more advantageous response than flying toward darkness.
Moths are more sensitive to some wavelengths of light - ultraviolet, for example - than they are to others. A white light will attract more moths than a yellow light. Yellow is a wavelength moths don't respond to.
Another interesting question is: Why do moths stay at lights? A moth's eyes, like a human's eyes, contain light sensors and adjust according to the amount of light the sensors detect. In high illumination, light from each of the moth's thousands of fixed-focuslensfacets is channeled to its own sensor. In low illumination, light from multiple lenses is channeled to the sameommatidiumto increase light sensitivity. You probably experience a few moments of blindness when you turn on a bright light after your eyes have adjusted to darkness, or when you are suddenly in darkness after being in bright light. A moth's dark-adapting mechanism responds much more slowly than its light-adapting mechanism. Once the moth comes close to a bright light, it might have a hard time leaving the light since going back into the dark renders it blind for so long. In the case that the moth escapes, it won't remember the problem with flying too near the light and will probably find itself in the same predicament all over again.
phototaxis：趨光性
positively phototactic：向光的
lepidopterist：磷翅類昆蟲學者
calibrate：校準
lens: 晶狀體
ommatidium ：小眼，節肢動物復眼的延長結構之一
（英語點津 Annabel 編輯）
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