10 Simple Questions We Have No Answer For

3. Why are moths drawn to light?

 

Photo by Unzhakov from shutterstock.com

I am sure that you noticed at least once in your life that moths seem to mindlessly flock to light and run into it. But the reason behind these insects’ strange behavior still remains a total scientific mystery.

Some entomologists think that artificial light sources throw off the moths’ internal navigation systems. They are primarily nocturnal creatures, so they evolved to travel by the glimmer of the mood, exactly by a method which is known as transverse orientation. According to Jeff Smith, curator of the moth collection at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, transverse orientation is to moths just as to humans is  keeping the North star in a certain position for guidance. It is thought that these insects keep the light source at a certain position in relation to their bodies for guidance.

But there are a few problems with this theory. The most major being that campfires have been around for about 400,000 years, so why didn’t all moths die already by natural selection if their instinct tells them to go into any blinding light?

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A.D.

View Comments

  • Let nature take it's course, natural human immunity is the best cure for it, so stop trying to fix what God has already perfected...

  • In order to HAVE time you need at least two objects that are not like each other in any manner. In the situation where that does exist movement of one relative to the other is time. We have that situation.

  • Time does NOT exist. It is a virtual concept created by man to measure how fast something changes. IE distance traveled per hour. And if you thing about time travel is absolutely ridiculous because to travel back in "time" you would have to move every atom in the universe back to its position at that time. Going forward in time is even more difficult because you would have to predict all the random events that would occur in the universe and then move all atoms in the universe to that position. Impossible to that. So time was created by man, a very useful concept but still doesn't have "existence".

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