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August 2024: A Right to Night?, Light Pollution News.

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The theme of this second half might as well be this, do people have a right to night?

Well, Trisha Hussey out of Santa Fe, New Mexico might believe so. She wrote a letter to the editor in the Santa Fe New Mexican detailing light trespass, a form of light pollution, that became apparent when a neighboring property housed a new business of some type.

Unlike many responsible businesses, this company apparently installed technically “compliant” security lighting that is an outright assault on her property. She’s attempted to communicate with the business multiple times, but unfortunately, the business is just fine with being an intrusive and irresponsible neighbor.

The Journal of Environmental Psychology had an article this month that looked at perceptions and feelings of safety of park attendees at night – specifically at how lighting influenced that person’s enjoyment of their experience and likelihood to repeat it.

The study set up an experimental testing grounds adjacent to the Penn State University’s Arboretum. It held eight stations, each with lux settings ranging from .5lux to 10lux, one group using amber light and the other using white light. The study involved 156 individuals, mostly undergrads, whereby the majority spent their lives growing up in a suburban environment, while rural and city folks split the remaining difference. Most had recreated at night previously.  

The end result, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that people feel safer with brighter, whiter light.

Now in this study, they used 3000K as the white temperature light and 560nm as the warm colored light, which they describe as “monochromatic amber”. The results skewed most determinedly in favor of daytime with urban dwellers.

Well, staying on this topic, in Astronomy Magazine, Light Pollution took center stage. And there was something interesting that I took from that article.

Christopher Cokinos who penned the piece, discussed the case of Tucson. Over a two year span from 2016 through 2017, the city began down a path to convert street lights over to shielded LEDs. And by shielded, here’s something I was not aware of – shielding for LED fixtures refers to an inset of the LED inside the fixture itself.

The lights themselves begin at 90% brightness and gradually decrease to 60% over the early morning hours. According to Dark Sky International, this resulted in a 7% reduction of sky glow caused by light pollution.

What struck me about this piece was a quote from past guest, John Barentine, citing that there has been “no increase in crime or traffic accidents that we can detect in the available data.”

We have one additional story that pertains to this topic of insecurity. I’m touching on this story because it pertains to the overall topic of Smart Cities, which involve either novel solutions…or creepy intrusions, depending on what side of the aisle you sit on, maybe both. This story harks back to a topic that Jennifer Huygen hit on when she joined me for Why It’s so Bright at Night.

Northampton, England is serious about stomping out crimes against women. Crimes, that I may add, are what drove Huygen to petition for park lighting.

A bouncer asked the town’s CCTV to track an inebriated woman who left the nightclub alone to ensure her safety. The cameras identified a stranger approaching her – which triggered intervention from a group of community volunteers known as the Northampton Guardians. According to the Northampton police, the individual, a man who complied when questioned by the Guardians, will now be stopped should he enter the bar district at night ever again.

Since we’re talking smart cities, one city is taking lighting into their own hands – and that is because they want to own their smart city integration once they switch over to LED lighting. The city of Grand Junction, Colorado is looking to reel in the “cash cow for public utilities” which will end up costing them between $10.5M to $18M.

And let’s put this segment of street lighting to bed on a good note! It took 10 years and the swapping of over 5,094 lighting fixtures, but the Grand Canyon has now converted over 90% of its lighting to become dark sky compliant!  

Great work, it was a long road, but we’re happy to hear the great news!

Onto health news, we have an interesting study that came out of The Lancet.  In a study that tracked 85,000 people between the ages of 40-69 for 9 years, it was found that light exposure between the hours of 12:30 AM to 6:00 AM significantly increased their chances of developing type 2 diabetes.

Participants wore a light detecting device that logged their exposure to light. Individuals with preexisting type 2 diabetes were excluded from the study. The study had several limitations, as you’d expect, however, what appears to be clear is that there was some sort of correlative relationship between light at night and metabolic disorders that may cause type 2 diabetes. The exact cause or driver of that isn’t determined by this study.

The study had enough confidence in their findings to state the following in spite of its limitations, “brighter night light remained a robust predictor of type 2 diabetes even after comprehensive model adjustments.”

I should note some prior studies on this very topic of artificial light at night and diabetes. While this study assessed individuals with the mean age of 62, two other studies looked at those in their 70s and found a greater propensity for type 2 diabetes to develop when exposed to nighttime light of certain thresholds. One additional study looked at individuals aged in their 20s and found that an environment with a moderate brightness of 100 lux increased insulin resistance the following morning.

This comes to us from a review in the journal Trends in Cardiovascular Medicine, whereby researchers tallied studies that looked at both noise and light pollution… to say that light is understudied is a misnomer. If you look at this review, light pollution is barely even mentioned in health studies looking at coronary artery disease, heart failure, stroke, and atrial fibrillation.

More in the circadian rhythm space, as this one comes to us from the journal, Cell Reports.  Researchers looked at how our circadian rhythm played a crucial role in building immune cells, noting that the body strategically leverages sleep to maximize the efficiency of immune cell production. More credence to working together towards a healthy circadian environment.

It’s time for my favorite story of the month, right here.

It’s August and you at home may have been lucky enough to see really good firefly displays this year. Now here’s something that I bet you didn’t know.

The US has somewhere in the order of 170 different firefly species, split between three general types: daytime fireflies, glowworms, and the traditional flashing ones that some of us see at night.

This story comes to us from Aliza Chasan at CBS News. Fireflies seek out moist spots to lay pinhead sized eggs – typically areas in the soil, moss, or under the leaves of rice plants. It takes upward of two years for the larvae to emerge from the ground as adults. 

During that time, fireflies look more like pill bugs than they do the beetle presentation later in life. The larvae feast on a number of local soil-based invertebrates by injecting animals such as worms, slugs, and snails with neurotoxins that paralyze the creatures. Hence, some may see them as a natural form of pest control.

So it’s not a shock that, in addition to light pollution from artificial light at night, that climate change may play a major role in damaging firefly habitat – particularly long extensions of drought, and also, which is something you probably did know, lawn pesticides are particularly devastating.

This leads us to Bali in Indonesia, where a grassroots initiative is trying to “bring back the light” of fireflies. Per Wayan Wardika, the founder of the Bring Back the Light firefly conservation lab, fireflies are the symbol of wisdom. And from that, fireflies are considered harbingers of clean air, water, and soil.  

Now Wardika is really something of a self-starter, driven by his childhood experiences where he had no electricity, rather he embraced a passion for the nighttime stars and the blinking of fireflies. The lab, which unfortunately I couldn’t find a founding date anywhere, probably came into existence in the last 6-10 years. In the video, they mention that they had no data or understanding of fireflies but have since progressed to be able to mate fireflies to help grow the population in the wild.

In fact, the conservation lab claims that there is NO data on the overall firefly population in Indonesia at this time, of course, they are beginning to build out of their own research.

Here’s one thing that I did not know about fireflies, that they actually help to pollinate Indonesian rice fields. What the hell can’t these bugs do?

Staying in ecology.

Artificial light at night appears to impact new and young fish that haven’t yet reached adulthood. In a study that was presented to the Society for Experimental Biology in July, researchers found that larval fish were highly attracted to lit environments – including ones with artificial light.

Per one of the researchers, Jules Schligler, a Ph.D. student at CRIOBE Laboratory, “ALAN has produced an ecological trap where these fish, misled by human activity, now prefer habitats where their fitness will be lower.” To say in a different way, Artificial Light at Night may attract organisms that are less adapted to particular environments due to their attraction to light, thereby impacting fish stock replenishment and conservation.

Schligler also pointed out that a decade ago, a quarter of the non-Antarctic shoreline was impacted by light pollution, which he assumes has increased since that time.

A study in Journal of Hazardous Materials tried to identify an impact of two urban pollutants on aquatic biofilm growth. It looked at how Artificial Light at Night and the chemical compound, DDBAC, commonly used in household cleaners, affected chlorophyll production. While a joint impact assessment wasn’t able to be ascertained through this experiment, the results indicate that continuous lighting, driven by artificial light at night in the second half of the day, reduced the ability of algal communities to photosynthesize – be it from changes in the light absorption complexes of the film, damage to light absorption machinery from intense LEDs, or saturation in the “electron transport chain,” ALAN changed the composition of organisms in the biofilm, reducing green algae and replacing them with more diatoms, a microalgae.

And finally for ecology tonight, a study in the journal eLife proves yet again, just how important a natural night is to organisms big and, in this case, surprisingly big!  The Australian bull ant utilizes polarized moonlight to aid in navigation when the moon is not visible. Researchers were able to change the headings of bull ants by moving polarized patterns above the lead ant.

Babak Tafreshi is off on a new photojournalist project, the Life at Night Atlas, which can be found at nightatlas.org. The Life at Night Atlas is Tafreshi’s attempt to document how nocturnal animals interact with night.

Some sadder notes to finish out this month’s show.

First up is this sad story out of Bryce Canyon, whereby beloved Park Service Ranger, 78 year old, Tom Lorig tripped when assisting individuals at an astronomy festival. Lorig tripped and struck his head on a rock when directing a visitor to a shuttle bus scheduled to depart a quarter past midnight.

Here’s a name that many may recognize. In the land before Stellarium and ZWO, many amateur astronomers used physical atlases to find stars in the sky. Graphic Designer and illustrator, Wil Tirion started drawing star maps at the early age of 12 in 1955. However, his first big professional success arrived in 1981 when Sky Publishing Corporation premiered his Sky Atlas 2000.0, all drawn by hand mind you. Later, Tirion went on to publish the two volume Uranometria atlas set, named as an homage to the 1603 atlas of the same name by Johann Bayer.

Beginning in the 1990s, by way of copious hours in front of Adobe Illustrator and a software program named Project Pluto’s Guide program, Tirion ditched the pencils for computer aided drafting. You’ve seen his work in the Atlas of the Night Sky and the annual Guide to the Night Sky.

Will Tirion died at age 81 on July 5^th , leaving behind his wife Cokkie and children, Martin and Naara.