Do we finally understand why winged insects seem drawn to light?

Moths – and many other flying insects – being drawn to human-made light at night is something most people have observed firsthand, across history and around the world. But despite this phenomenon’s ubiquity, good explanations for it have proved elusive. As the UK biologist Samuel Fabian details in a short video from Nature, the most common explanations – that the creatures are drawn to heat or that they mistake artificial lights for the Moon while trying to navigate the night sky – don’t hold up in lab tests. Instead, Fabian argues that new camera technology, finally up to the task of capturing fast-flying insects at night, points to a somewhat novel explanation: what’s known as the dorsal light response, in which insects orient themselves so their upper sides face the brightest area around them.