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Street lamps can shape the surrounding invertebrate community, attracting predators and scavengers day and night.
Thomas Davies and his team at the University of Exeter in Penryn, UK, set traps under and between 14 lamp posts on a street in a town in Cornwall, and collected samples before each sunrise and sunset for three days. The researchers classified the invertebrates on the basis of their feeding strategies: predators, scavengers, grazers, parasites and detritivores, which consume rotting material. Overall, there were more invertebrates under the lamps than between them, but predators and scavengers in particular were more abundant. Harvestmen, ants and ground beetles preferred the grass under the lamp posts both day and night, indicating that they were not simply drawn by the light.
Light pollution could affect the structure and function of ecosystems, the researchers suggest.
Biol. Lett. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2012.0216 (2012)
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Illuminating invertebrate habitats. Nature 487, 9 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/487009f
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/487009f
