Modern cities, highways, markets, and residential areas remain brightly illuminated throughout the night. While artificial lighting improves visibility and safety for humans, it unintentionally attracts large numbers of insects.
Many insects spend hours circling around streetlights, floodlights, billboards, and decorative lighting instead of feeding, reproducing, or performing their natural ecological roles. Some die from exhaustion, predation, collisions, or disruption of their normal behavior.
Since insects are important pollinators and form the foundation of many food chains, their decline can affect birds, bats, reptiles, plants, and entire ecosystems. Despite this, most people only notice insects around lights and rarely consider the long-term environmental consequences.I observed that every night hundreds of insects gather around streetlights and bright outdoor lamps. By morning many are dead or missing. Since this happens every night across thousands of locations, I wondered whether artificial lighting is silently affecting insect populations and the ecosystems that depend on them.