Abstract

Artificial light at night is an increasing threat to nocturnal biodiversity. Aside from the overall increase in light emission, replacement of old monochromatic streetlighting by broad emission spectrum LED lights may be an additional threat. Studies evaluating the impacts of these artificial lights on the nocturnal European common glow-worm (Lampyris noctiluca L.) are scarce. This study examines the effects of upward facing white LED lights on the mate seeking activity of male glow-worms. Therefore we used traps with dummy females along a distance gradient from LED lights with different intensities and colour temperature (cold and warm white) and counted the number of males attracted per trap. We found that upward facing white LED light negatively impacted the males’ ability to locate the females, at previously unreported low light levels, while colour temperature did not affect the outcomes. More research on the effects of light pollution and their underlying mechanisms is needed to evaluate the impacts of this emerging and widespread threat on mating success and population persistence of glow-worms.

Implications for insect conservation

Our study has important implications for glow-worm conservation as we showed that white LED lights, which are increasingly used on a large scale as streetlighting and other outdoor lighting, have strong negative impacts on the mate finding success of glow-worms, even at low light levels. We have furthermore demonstrated that colour temperature does not mitigate the lowered mate attraction success of dummy females under white light.

中文翻译：

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白色LED的光强度而不是色温会干扰萤火虫（Lampyris noctiluca L.）雄性的配色

摘要

夜间的人工照明对夜间生物多样性构成了越来越大的威胁。除了总的发光量增加之外，用宽光谱的LED灯代替旧的单色路灯可能是另外的威胁。评估这些人造光对夜间欧洲常见夜蛾（Lampyris noctiluca）的影响的研究L.）稀缺。这项研究研究了朝上的白色LED灯对雄性萤火虫的寻找活动的影响。因此，我们使用了具有假雌性的诱集装置，它们与不同强度和色温（冷白和暖白）的LED灯之间的距离梯度不同，并计算了每个诱集装置吸引的雄性数量。我们发现，朝前的白色LED灯在以前未报告的弱光水平下对雄性定位雌性的能力产生了负面影响，而色温却不影响结果。需要对光污染的影响及其潜在机制进行更多研究，以评估这种新兴且广泛存在的威胁对萤火虫的交配成功和种群持久性的影响。

对昆虫保护的意义

我们的研究对萤火虫的保护具有重要意义，因为我们发现，白光LED灯越来越广泛地用作路灯和其他室外照明，即使在低照度条件下，也会对配偶成功地产生巨大的负面影响。灯光水平。我们还证明了色温不能减轻白光下假雌性的降低的交配成功率。