Riding my bike past the WARF building tonight I noticed this interesting light display on one of the gigantic spotlights that lights up this 14 story building. As Madison grows, the intensity of light pollution in the city is likely to grow as well. There are several of these lights pointed directly up at the WARF building, which means a lot of the light is going directly into our night sky. Anyway, it's a cool spot to watch moths zooming around, and in reading about why insects are attracted to and will continuously fly into artificial (and fire) light for hours, I found that insect scientists' best theories all have holes. I do appreciate the artwork that comes from the insect-to-light attraction, but have also read that when city lights are on all night, thousands upon thousands of moths and other insects die from burning, crashing into the light repeatedly, or exhaustion from circling it. Does the rest of nature gorge on the dead moths and get the nutrients it would have eaten over a longer period of time anyway? Or have moths declined in urban areas over the past fifty years to the point where the food chain has shifted and some moth-eating species are gone from our cities?
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