Light Pollution: Lecture and Q&A by Craig Repasz transcript

[Music] All right, everyone. Hopefully you can see me and hear me. Okay. Uh my name is Siobhan and thank you for joining us tonight for our environmental learning series. Uh tonight we are lucky to welcome Craig Repaz who's going to tell us all about Lights Out Connecticut and the work they're doing. Uh and we're going to hear about light pollution and its effects on humans, birds, and wildlife. Um and before I let Craig take over and tell us all about that, uh I just want to give a few quick plugs for Earth Place.

So, if you enjoy our environmental learning series, um first of all, this will be recorded and we'll make it available to view all over again so you can re-watch it or share it with people, spread the message. Uh and then next month in May, our topic is going to be partnerships and betrayal, plant and insect interactions. That'll be on May 29th and also on Zoom also from 7 to 8 if you're interested in joining for that.

Um, if you'd like to come to Earthplace for an in-person program, uh, we're in Westport if you aren't familiar with us. And on June 8th, we are going to be having our first biob blitz, which I'm excited about. We're going to survey our entire property, see what wildlife and plants we can find there, and the public is welcome to join. So, even if you've never been to a biolitz before, you're welcome to come join us for that.

And then a big event we're having in June is our third mothball. Third annual mothball. Uh so we are going to have a lot of moth related activities and fun including light sheeting, surveying for moths outside. Uh and it's just going to be a big celebration of natural wildlife besides just moths. Uh so with all that out of the way, um I will also mention if you think of questions or comments as Craig is presenting, you're welcome to type them in the chat and uh we'll make sure we make time to read out your questions as they come up or towards the end.

All right. And with that, uh, I'll let Craig go ahead and tell us about light pollution. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Siobhan. So, to start off, um, let's have a story. It's a bedtime story about our ancestors and their bodies. This would be as their day darkened into night. You could experience the same thing. Now, if you were to go rustic camping, leaving your uh bright torches and your headlamps home, you can have the same experience.

Our ancestors worked outside. They were sewing fields, building stone walls, cutting salt hay from the marshes, or they were laboring in the farm houses, making cloth, or preserving food. And generations and generations before that, our ancestors would hunt and gather to the slow rhythms of the sunlight. Eventually there was the industrial revolution and in the early industrial revolution people were also working by the sunlight you know with the large windows in these early factories.

So after the day they had eaten and cleaned up their homes would be lit by candles or fireplaces or whale oil lanterns. This was a soft glow color, nice yellow amberh color uh that filled the house. So they might need to go to the privy or get some firewood or a hot of coal. They could look up into a perfect night sky and see the mist and the stories in the constellations. They could forecast the weather if there were clouds or by watching the behavior of the smoke wafting out of the chimney.

The constellations and the phases of the moon could tell them when to plant or harvest their crops. Depending on the time of the year, they could experience bats, fireflies, birds, crickets, and katy dids. Then the lantern was snuffed out. It takes humans 15 minutes for for our pupils to adjust. Then it takes a full 45 minutes for us to build up a protein pigment called redopsin in our retinas. Once acclimated, we could see in the dark, as well as rabbits and whipperwills.

However, one flash of light and we're back to zero. So, very few of us have actually experienced humans full acclimization to the night sky. We also have eye shine. You probably see what that is with uh if you ever saw a fox or deer in the headlights, their eye seems to glow all these different colors. Uh this is a tapatum. It reflects light back out so they could reuse it uh making the light in a dim night setting um much more usable.

So if you remember old photographs and there was redeye that's artipatum. So few of us embrace the dark even though we have had some adaptations to live in it. These are ancient wellfounded fears. Few of us interact with the night and the darkness. The dark is this black region beyond the glare of our garage light of the street lamps and the glow around our towns and cities. We evolved to have circadian cycles. Our co-evolution with the dark is ancient.

Our exposure to artificial light at night is new. So there are two main actors in our story. The first is leptin. In the dark, our leptin rates start to rise. And this gives us this kind of a comfortable feeling, a full feeling, and we start to get tired. And when the sun start when the sun will rise in the morning, we start to get hungry again. That's when we will break our fast. So this chemical regulates our glucose levels.

So if it's out of whack, there are some some major issues we have to deal with. The other actor is melatonin. So, as uh as we enter into the dark area, our melatonin levels start to rise and this kicks our immune system into tumor suppression mode. So, during the day, if we're exposed to smoke, sunlight, all of these things that could damage cells and our DNA in our cells, um we have some issues here. That's the beginning of cancer.

But this tumor suppression mode of our immune system kicks in and u tries to nip it at the bud. So you can imagine if that's disrupted. So I ask you a few questions. Um what phase is the moon in right now? It's actually a waning gibbus and it'll be full in another 27 days. We had a full moon about two days ago. What constellations in our sky? If you look up we'll see Leo, Gemini, Virgo boutes. Another question. Who has seen the Milky Way?

Who has seen the Milky Way in the past year? As humans in a modern world, we can go nights, weeks, months, and years without noticing the night sky, and we think we're functioning just fine. Humans have always tried to light the night with fire and torches. But since 1807, when gas street lamps were introduced, man has continued to try to further push back the night. As time moved on, we would develop incandescent bulbs in the light of the bright hallogens.

And now we have these light LEDs that will burn like a t like a million tiny suns. The wavelength is that bright. One could say our future look bright. Or we could say there's certainly brightness in our future. And we're paying a price as is our wildlife. Does anybody recognize this place? This is a satellite image of the northeastern United States. And you could actually see Montreal. So, uh, it's easy to see the 95 corridor.

You can see Westport on this. You can see Fairfield, Bridgeport, um, all of our cities. So, since 2011, the night sky has become 10% brighter every year. That's because of the use of these H hallogens that I mentioned. That is to say, a baby born with 250 stars visible in the sky will see only a hundred by the time she is 18 on average. I like to say each point of light in this photograph is a decision. It's a decision made by somebody to leave that light on that is going to impact our health, our safety, and our environment.

I don't know how many of you have actually seen an excellent dark sky. Most of us are living in nine or seven according to this chart. Incidentally, this is the mortal scale. This was used by astronomers and now this is used by Dark Sky International to grade our night sky as far as light pollution. So in order to get a dark sky, the closest place we only have one east of the Mississippi and that's up in Maine past Greenville um Moosead Lake.

So what would take your ancestors to simply going out to the privy to see a perfect night sky? Now we have to drive six seven hours to get there to see this. So most of us are living in this globe glowing orb around our cities and along our megalopous. Some of these stars are so far away we can't see them now. Their light actually left that star when dinosaurs roamed our planet. The complete poem of the universe is being robbed from us.

So let's start with humans. Light pollution impacts human health, causing stress and insomnia. Artificial night lighting has dramatically disturbed our circadian rhythms, most notably our sleep cycles. In turn, many people are chronically sleepdeprived, which contributes to mood disorders, depression, reduced cognitive efficiency, and learning. Disrupted circadian rhythms associated with artificial light, nightlighting have been strongly linked to impaired metabolic functions, obesity, and various types of cancer, especially those that are endocrine related.

Melatonin, chemical I already mentioned, has antioxidant properties. It induces sleep, boosts the immune system, lowers cholesterol, and helps the functioning of the thyroid, pancreas, ovaries, testes, and the adrenal glands. So in 2012, the American Medical Association declared late at night carcinogenic. Let that one hit in. There was a study uh in 2008 done in Israel that with a certain level of light pollution, they noted that there was a 73% higher risk of these women for developing breast cancer compared to controls.

So yeah, we it can affect our obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes. It is one family of disease due to the impact of light pollution on the leptin cycle. I'm just going to show you a few of these studies. We're not going to take a deep dive. This isn't medical school. Um but just to give you an understanding of the literature that's out there and how recent some of these studies are. So you see that one study that came out in September 2024 has linked light pollution to all to Alzheimer's disease.

This was shown in people who are 65 or younger. That is early onset Alzheimer's. So if you know somebody who's impacted, chances are that they have had um issues with light pollution uh in their environment where they live. Melatonin will upregulate the immune system and has anti-inflammatory properties. Um so yeah uh if this cycle is impaired you know we really become uh at much greater risk for cancer. There was a study um that it's called the nurses study.

It tracked um nurses mainly women that were working nighttime positions uh either second or third shift. This was tracked from 1989 to 2013. They found that there was a 14% increase in breast cancer of women who were exposed. The study also found a relationship to neighborhood light exposure and later development of lung cancer. So my early research was showing that it's primarily these endocrine related um cancers, but this is also showing that lung cancer is at a higher risk.

So guys out there, we're not alone. uh men and prostate cancer is a huge issue. Studies have shown that we will have a two to three times increase rate of prostate cancer. So a lot of people will will say first of all but wait you know all this light is there to make us safer. However there's no clear scientific evidence that increased outdoor lighting deteers crime. It m might make us feel safe but has not been shown to make us safer.

There is a study in 2015 uh that was um published in the journal of epidemiology and community health. They studied 62 m municipalities in England and Wales and found that lighting had no effect on road collisions or crime. Whether they had turned the lights off um all over or just dimmed them or turned some on and left some off, there was no change. There's no difference, no impact. Um in fact, most property crime occurs in the light of the day.

And some crimes like vandalism and graffiti actually thrive on night lighting. One of the most important ways to deer crime is to put your lights on a motion sensor. So somebody's in the dark, they trip, the the lights, they come on, they don't know if they are on a camera or somebody's there and the the person who's looking to create a crime is going to run. That's the most efficient way. So a dark sky does not necessarily mean dark ground.

Smart lighting that directs light where it is needed creates a balance between safety and starlight. So you see in this picture we have these um orbs around the street post. So if these are downshielded um you would get rid of uh any any type of tripall hazard that you might have. Also with safety that lights do not increase the safety. Some studies show an increase in crime and there are more accidents on the streets with glare from street lamps and from security lighting.

Now, do you see somebody standing there between the headlights? So, the glare is a real issue. It creates this ocular stress. It there's a reduction in our situational awareness. there's a potential loss in balance and this is pretty important with the elderly and it can literally cause pain. One study that came out in 2000, it's called the Chicago Alley study. Uh they were going to change the lights in Chicago. Uh they were going to go from 90 watts to 250 watts and they were going to put a lot more lights in.

So they measured the different crimes um from violent offenses to property crimes. Um and they the you see here in the before and after there's really not much change but the after shows there was more crime overall. So this this flies in the face of people say that light pollution makes us safer. So, getting back to the human story, not only does light pollution impact our health and our safety, it connects us from our heritage and from our nature.

I love this painting. I I recently read um well, let me back up a bit. I'm a fan of Joseph Campbell and he talks about these uh paintings in Leco Cave in southern France that it used to be a right of passage for um boys who are becoming men. But at least recent scholarship describes this as a star chart. So yeah, so the these are actually constellations. Um so this shows that there was a really deep connection. The people then believed that there was three worlds, the sky world, the underworld and then the earth world.

And you could go from one to the other uh by that meaning you could go to the heavens by going underground. So sky worship became a huge factor in many religions and this is at our heritage as a species. So now we live in a world of changing landscapes. Rivers are damned. Wetlands are drained. Forests are cleared and paved. Houses and malls are built in meadows. Some of these places carry names like Orchard View or Meadow View.

And there's no orchards left anymore. No meadows left. Even mountain tops and ridges are removed. The land would not be recognizable to our ancestors or to the people who lived here before our ancestors arrived. The night sky remains the same now as it did back then. It is a direct link to our past. Light pollution is disconnecting us from our place in history and the cosmos. The National National Park Service even states, "Experiencing the same night sky helps us imagine Teddy Roosevelt sitting on his porch in Orista Bay in his later years looking at the stars." Aldo Leopold hiking under the full moon on the sand dunes of Wisconsin.

Or Carl Sandber crafting poetic words amidst natural beauty. or hardcrabled homesteaders finding respect in the prairie sky after a long day's work. So even people many of our American friends have escaped slavery traveling by night to avoid being captured. They followed the drinking gourd which is known as our big dipper. So, think of a student learning this history, trying to find this group of stars in a downtown city here in Connecticut, and they can't because it's all obscured with light pollution.

They're divorced from their history. Furthermore, the night sky could help us heal. The darkness may promote natural plasticity. This is the brain's ability to rewire itself. activities that facilitate brain plasticity could help prevent cognitive decline, dementia, and other age related concerns. According to a study in 2020 out of the University of Rochester, there could be benefits to being in a dark adapted state.

If you do it regularly, neochemical changes in the brain are going to affect plasticity. Others have simply stated that people who are exposed to a starry night sky experience ease and a greater sense of well-being and greater health. So light pollution obviously messes with our internal clocks. There was a study, I really wish I could have been a part of this, um, out of University of Colorado in Boulder where in order to see if they could reset their natural clocks, they went camping and they left their headlamps home.

And what they have what they found, it just took a day or two for them to reset the natural rhythms. People were falling asleep earlier. They were getting up earlier, you know, with the light. They were feeling more refreshed. So the night sky and heavens are a source of awe. Awe is that feeling that you get when confronted with something vast that transcends our normal f frame of reference and that we struggle to understand.

It's a mix of amazement and fear. Something that threatens to consume us. The night sky is a perfect source of awe for us as well as our ancestors. I know some of you at Earth Plays probably love watching insects or a butterfly uh break out of its crystallis. That is awe on a smaller level. Current research has shown a sense of awe can break habitual ways of thinking, making us more creative and more interested in the world.

Memories improve. We have better focus. After a feeling of genuine awe, people feel happier and less stressed weeks later. Awe can cut inflammation by affecting the cytoines that mediate stress hormones for fight or flight. Awe makes us nicer people. After experiencing awe, people are less worried about goals and concerns, feel more connected to others and the world, make more ethical decisions, care less about money, and more about the environment.

That voice in our head, self-interest, self-confidence disappears. We feel more connected to a greater whole, society, earth, even the universe. So, we do need the night sky as as humans. So, let's talk about um wildlife. I'd like to underscore and if you were to leave this presentation and this is your is your take-home me message the night is an ecological niche. So with with birds I'm don't know how many have seen the study that came out in uh 2019 that we have lost three billion birds in North America since 1970. 90% come from just 12 bird families including sparrows, warblers, finches, and sparrows.

And one of the important things with that group of birds is that they migrate. So some of the big factors impacting this are cats. We lose up to three billion birds to cats in North America every year. window collisions, we lose up to two billion, pesticides and chemicals, and habitat loss. We have 722 bird species in North America. Of those, 76% migrate. Of these, 80% migrate at night. Alone, Connecticut has a 148 species that migrate through or from Connecticut.

We must remember the night sky is vital habitat. So why would birds migrate at night? First of all, they, you know, these birds that are migrating, they're active during the day. They're dial, so their eyesight really isn't the greatest for night vision, but they have evolved to migrate at night because it's cooler. When you're flapping wings as many beats per minute that they are, you need to uh you're going to work up some heat.

Also, there's one way of avoiding predators when they're flying. So, every spring and fall, they migrate at night. They evolved millions of years ago to navigate. They evolved to take advantage of the explosion of insects and other food in the northern hemisphere. So, they were bountiful resources to raise their young. You know, before the meeting started, we were chatting about how important moths are. Um, but their caterpillars are crucial to birds.

I don't know if anybody really studied Doug Tolly, but he suggests that we take care of our oak trees because of the abundance of caterpillars that use oaks um in their life cycles, and that feeds a lot of our birds. These birds are following ancient routes that navigate by the stars, the moon, and the earth's electromagnetic field. Researchers have identified cryptochromes on the edge of the bird's retinas. These cryptochromes have been shown to govern circadian rhythms in both animal and plant species and they are enable birds to see the earth's magnetic field.

It's kind of neat how it works. There's a photon from a distant star that could trigger uh this protein in a process called quantum disentanglement. But once it's been activated, they literally see the earth's electromagnet electromagnetic field. They discovered um back in 1975 working in Cornell lab of ornithology uh Elman Steven Elman um was doing some research on these indigo buntings. He put them in these funnels with paper on the floor.

They dipped their claws in ink and they could determine what direction that the bird was trying to take off in. and um brought the birds inside these funnels into a planetarium and the birds would orient themselves so they would want to take off to the north. Obviously, this would be for the spring migration. So, they um his conclusion was that birds do not see the constellations, do they have a concept of constellations, but they can detect the movement of the stars.

This is something that humans could do, but we have to line up a star with the side of the house or a tree or something and and just kind of over a minute or two see its distance uh it's changing its position where the birds pretty much pick it up right away. So between the treetops and the mountain tops to the stratosphere, there's a layer of it's a layer cake of air currents, bands of cold and warm air, jet streams, headwinds and tailwinds.

These layers can both help and hinder migrating birds. But um a tailwind or updrafts can kill birds. Uh the the head the headwinds would kill the birds. They will time their flight when there's a good tailwind because you have a small bird. They can only hold so so many calories in their fat. So if they could have a good tailwind, it pushes them along and they could um cover major major miles during migration. we can experience the migration as the birds eclipse the moon.

So, um this spring if there is a full moon, go out and um try to count the silhouettes. It's it's pretty neat. But to give you an an estimate of what this scale is like, what we're going to experience uh this spring is roughly 3.5 billion birds coming in from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. coming out of the contiguous United States, there's going to be 2.6 billion birds going into Canada. Many of the birds that we have in Connecticut during the spring, um birders get very excited.

We have colorful warblers. They're just on their way through. They breed up in Canada. So during the fall migration, there's about four billion birds that come from Canada and 4.7 billion birds that come from the United States down into Mexico and the neotropics. So look at these numbers. That means the the return rate back to Canada is 64% and the return rate home to the United States is 76%. Um that's a major attrition.

So something's happening along the way that's killing these birds. So what I was saying earlier, it could be a loss of habitat, it could be cats, and it could be window strikes. You could go to Birdcast. I highly recommend it. Um, this is a is a great way to um predict when the birds are coming through. This is based on radar. When you start to get these warmer colors, um you're going to have a lot more birds coming.

These birds are following these ancient uh migratory routes. But you see, especially on the east coast, they're flying over some major cities like Miami, Orlando, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York, all of our cities here in in Connecticut. So, one of the most important things is um you know uh that these birds are able to sense weather. However, they will not take off if the weather is bad. They could be a flight when the weather turns on them, and that will um kind of beat them up and force them down in areas where they don't normally uh need to be.

Uh they need to get into uh areas that have a good tailwind. So, in the on the east coast, they um can't go too high because the winds could be too rough for them. So they have a way of flying over lower elevations, lower altitudes. The problem with that is it puts them in direct contact with our cities. Recognize this place? This is New York. So what happens when they are flying over our cities is in even our towns the the lights become disorient disorienting to them on two ways.

When they're migrating, they will see a city in the sky glow in the distance and think that's the rising sun, which triggers to them, signals to them that it's time to land wherever they can where they could rest, eat, and take off the next night. However, because the light pollution confuses them, disorients them, they're going to land in places where they don't normally go. For example, a lot of birders feel that Central Park is one of the best places to go birding.

That's true. It's great for the birders, but very terrible for the birds. They're forced down into these areas that they would normally fly over. Likewise, along the coast with the light pollution, we're going to find an inordinate number of birds in our backyards and our town parks. oftentimes if there is um our internal lights in the building, the birds can mistake them for stars and um actually collide. But the majority of the issue happens when the birds um are landing after they've exhausted themselves because they're disoriented and they come into areas where they don't belong.

So that could be our city parks for example and there they could be exposed to cats and other predators. But the real issue when they're landing in our parks and our backyards, they are surrounded by glass windows, glass doors. That could be our patio and it or it could be uh some commercial building. If it's an atrium, they think they could fly through and they collide with a ga with a glass. Or they see their reflection, they think they're going to fly into a tree or some shrubs and they fly into glass.

And to compound the issue are these beacons that can come out of the the skylow in our cities and our airports. The issue with this, and this is uh the studies go back into the mid uh 1800s uh with lighouses during migration, that birds when they pass one of these beacons, they will um change their course of flight by a few degrees to 360°. That means they could spend all night circling these beacons and they have do been documented to literally fall out of the sky exhausted or dead.

One of the most famous beacons that we have is the 9/11 monument. Unfortunately, this uh tragedy occurred in September and they commemorate it with these beacons that shine up where the trade towers used to be. And of course, this was immediately a problem to the birds. They would circle and circle and circle and fall out of the sky. Fortunately, because of efforts by the New York City Ottabon, they are working with the monument staff, they will monitor the birds of circling the the beacons and when it reaches a certain level of birds, they shut off the lights and then the birds will reorient themselves and fly on.

Uh, and this is after 20 30 minutes, they're able to recover. um that gets them out of the funk is that they they will fly in these circles. Their uh contact calls become extremely uh frenetic and they they are definitely uh stressed and once the light is off they're able to uh come back to normal and go on. So what numbers are we talking about here? Um, a paper came out in 2014 and it estimated that the loss of birds were from 100 million to 1 billion birds.

Unfortunately, there has been a new study that um from professor Clem that shows that the birds now are up to two billion. uh they uh did a reassessment of the mechanism of in of injury, the angle of impact and realized that these birds once it hit windows were actually dying all of them. You know, the only way to save them is to get to get them to a rehabber. Uh two October ago, um there was a huge tragedy that turned out to be um quite a learning lesson for people in the United States.

I used to use this slide to show that this um convention center McCormack Place in Chicago, they would turn their lights off um 50% of the lights and they had a reduction of the their collision mortalities of up to up to 60%. So that's kind of encouraging that it's not necessarily linear that you know even more would be better, but 50% was saving a lot. However, this one October, they had a uh it was a perfect storm.

Birds were migrating. The weather was just so uh they had a some event at McCormack Place that they left the lights on all night. And what happened? As the sun was rising, a thousand birds crashed to their death into the glass. that was collected by um Ottabbon people in Chicago and this got national attention on the news. So they um McCormack Place reached out to a company called Feather Friendly. They took on this huge project to retrofit all of these windows.

So they had these dots on the exterior window, dots that were 2 in apart. So now all of this glass was now visible to the birds. This past October, the fatality rate dropped to um by 95%. So, this works. You just have to show the birds that there's an obstacle there. I was giving a presentation at Wesleyan University and I came running up some stairs and I almost smashed into uh this glass uh this glass wall, but I saw it was there at the last second because they had decals.

We could do it for humans. We could do it for birds. Another way that some birds are impacted um these aerial insecttovores that could be uh our tree swallows, our barn swallows, our purple martins, they will u migrate early. They will migrate during the day because they can eat insects as they're flying. It's kind of like us driving that that we could eat a sandwich as we're drive as we drive. They eat insects as they migrate.

But they found if they are wintering in areas that is exposed to light pollution, they will arrive they they will leave their their winter grounds and arrive in North America a week or two before the insects that they need actually are prevalent. So that could lead to a lot a lot of loss. So I've been talking about birds. We are a bird uh based organization initially but we have expanded our scope to talk about other animals um like bats, moths, zup plankton, amphibians and fireflies.

So a couple things about the insects. Um there was a really casual study called the windshield study and it's just a matter of people who were driving around 10, 15, 20 years ago throughout the Northeast recognized that during the months of May and June, even into July, there were a lot of insects that were smooshed on the windshield and on the headlights. And now it's hardly an issue at all. So what's happening? It's a combination of things.

It's our the use of herbicides. It's the use of pesticides. Um it's the the cutting of our meadows and our forest. Um and even some of these weedy patches, you know, in our neighborhoods are now being developed. So definitely there's a loss loss of habitat. But also light pollution also plays a very important role. Another study um this this really came out from um some Germans who were noting that there was a huge fall off and the biomass that they were collecting.

They were amateur um entomologist and just realized that in the past couple of years that they weren't collecting the insects that they used to. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of data out there. Some biologists at Yukon have launched a a program called Ento GEM where they're trying to mine data bird population data to see if there's any signal there that could say something about our insects and the crashing of insects.

So, how do how does light pollution impact insects? Well, recently, just to show you how new some of our science is, they just solved the age-old mystery of how bad how um moths actually navigate uh AC um at navigating at night. We all know the story of the moth trapped in the back porch light. But what happens, what they're actually doing is if they orient themselves to the moon, they could fly in a straight light. How?

However, if that light source is really close to them, they can mistaken a street lamp, a porch light, a garage light as the moon. And because it's so much closer to them, they will fly in a circle instead of a straight line. So, they spend all night flying in a circle around the light, getting closer and closer. This used to fry them, but because people are using LEDs that do not emit a lot of heat, um they're they're not being killed by the heat.

The moths are being killed because they are wasting their energy. They're not feeding and they're not breeding. So, you could imagine a whole line of street lamps or a whole line of houses that have lamps the this type of lighting, we're going to lose our moths. So in a given area, you could lose an entire generation where the moths cannot go from one patch of trees to another in order to mate or lay eggs, whatever. They have different life cycles.

So that could be one explanation of why we're losing all of our moss. So I got some pretty pictures of moss here. They're kind of neat. Um but just to summarize, there's a disruption of their natural behaviors. It affects their feeding, mating, and migratory patterns. They found that um if caterpillars, moth caterpillars are exposed to light pollution, they they fail to actually pu pupate and so they won't even become moths.

Uh the there's an altered predator prey dynamic. bats. Um, even though they're going to be impaired by uh this light pollution, they will hang out and fly around uh lights because there's more moss there. Um, there's a great fall off of pollinator activity by these moths. When people mention pollinators, they automatically think of bees. However, moths are also very, very important pollinators. And in areas with light pollution, they're not as effective as they should be.

So all this will lead to their insects decline. So let's talk a little about about fireflies. Most of us growing up remember catching fireflies and putting them in jars. However, many people are reporting that they're not seeing fireflies anymore. And this is for a variety of reasons. our lawns, you know, we're mowing areas and destroying the habitat that the fireflies need. We're raking our leaves, so uh that very important part of their laral stage is being interrupted.

We're using uh fertilizers and most importantly, we're using um insecticides on on our lawn. This is a type of beetle. So, if you're trying to kill bugs and beetles, you're going to kill fireflies. Um, and light pollution of course is plays a huge role when the light when these lightning bugs are displaying like this. They're trying to attract a mate. Depends on the species. Sometimes the female glows, but usually the male glows and the females find them.

But they won't start glowing if they think it's daytime. So, if they're in an area that has a lot of light pollution, they're not going to start their glowing display. So, they will they will not mate. Actually, there are like up to five species in North America, fireflies that are looking at extinction. So, we also have the u spotted salamander that needs to migrate from its uh winter area down to vernal pools. It has never seen the sun.

So, if there is light pollution shining into the woods, they can't cross the boundary between the dark area and the lighted area. It confuses them. here again a lot more study is needed. So talking about the water um yeah light pollution impacts navigational um aquatic navigation um but for our sake tonight let's talk about the zoo plankton. The zoo plankton has a natural feeding schedule where during the day it is down in the lower part of the water column.

And when night comes on, they rise to the top to feed and to mate. However, when there's light pollution, they stay submerged. They don't come up. So, they don't feed and they don't mate. So, we're losing our zup plankton. Zup plankton serves the same role as insects in our ecosystem. This is what everything eats and it's the base of the uh food chain. So, let's talk about plants for a few minutes. When our plants are exposed to light pollution, it's going to disrupt their rhythms.

There's tree there's pictures out there showing light pollution um or lights near a tree that are h that's hanging on to its leaves well past the time that the rest of the tree has dropped its leaves or flowers that simply hang on. I've asked people who are into um hydroponics if they leave their lights on for their plants. You know, we all know that plants need light in order to photosynthesize. But people who do hydroponics, they will shut their lights off knowing that too much light is going to stress their plants.

It impacts us uh their gas exchange because their stos don't close. The leaves are thicker. They're um more prone to damages of um air pollution and desiccating because they can't close these u stoas. So huge huge impacts on our plants. So what can you do? You know, we tell people that the spring migration is April 1st to May 31st and to shut your lights off from 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. during these peak migration periods.

However, if you shut your lights off at this time all the time, everybody's going to be better off. So, uh, think about that. I also get into some other steps you could take with your lights. If you see a dead bird, um, go online either from the, uh, your cell phone pulling up the internet, do a search for debird and report the bird. If you're into birding and you use EIRD, you might know that they EIRD will not accept a dead bird report.

But DIRD is a way of recording um, any birds that you find dead uh, especially at the at the base of a building if it's window collision. And that goes into a database that can be used by researchers. Please join Lights Out Connecticut. You could go online. Um, it's simply Lights Out Connecticut. Some considerations to make with your lighting. Ask yourself these five questions. Is your lighting useful? You know, if you see like a a parking lot 2:00 in the morning, fully lit, and nobody's there.

Nobody's been there since like 6:00, they could shut those lights off. Ask the same question about your garage lights, your porch lights, your deck lighting, all of that. If you're not using it, simply shut it off. I know I I probably sound like a parent nagging, but um it's true. My parents were right. Is the light targeted? Is it going to be pointing only where you need it? If you're lighting up a walkway, you don't need to light up the trees overhead.

Nobody's walking up there. Just put it where you need it. Use some shielding. Is it the lowest level? We were talking earlier about humans being able to see in the dark or just being able to see by the moonlight that which is fine. So, if you have enough lumens, slightly more than a full moon, you can see just fine. You don't have to have something blazing like the midday sun. Is it controls? Are your lights on timers?

Are your lights on motion sensors? Is it warm colored? Try to use something uh not these really bright these blue uh violet lighting. Uh that is very common right now. But go with something that's more of that softer amber color. You know, something which is like 3,000 Kelvin or lower. This is a good graphic from Dark Sky International showing from best, better, and some of the worst. When I show up in person, I bring this uh display with me.

It's rather heavy, so kind of lucky I didn't have to lug it around. The light on the left are some of the worst because it's very bright and it shines out directly, so it could go into somebody's eyes, your neighbor's window. However, it is on a motion sensor. This other light is downshielded, which is great. And this other light, the one on the right, is showing the right kind of color that you want to use. That researchers have shown that has less damage on insects and um humans as anything else.

Um this is like a quick uh scale of what I'm talking about when it comes to using this term, Kelvin. Uh, so you want to use something that's below 3,000 or less. You don't want to get the 15 or 27,000 Kelvin. That's just very destructive. What happens is has a shorter wavelength, a lot more energy, and it bounces out off from particulates that are suspended in the air, and that creates all of this glare in the sky glow.

So, I did mention the whole idea of turning our lights off. You know, 100% is always best. Of course, make sure your windows are visible. Uh, use decals. Go to um American Bird Conservancy there. They have some great um information on how to apply decals. You could put up t uh tape. You could paint your windows just for a spring migration using temporary paints. It washes right off. Or you could use these vertical hanging cords.

Uh that's nice. Do it yourself. Or simply don't wash your windows. Just make sure they're really dirty. So if you could see them, the birds could see them. As we move on uh with this movement, we're finding uh more and more companies are coming out with commercially ready glass to go in that are already etched so the birds could see them. This is Evans Hall at Yale. This is kind of where our movement got started. If you look um on the picture on the left, you see these these windows, but up close, this is what the window looks like.

These dots are there. So, from a distance, these these dots really aren't noticeable, but up close, this is what they look like, but they're highly visible uh to the birds. And here again, when they applied this at certain sections of that building uh in New Haven, they found that there was a 95% decrease in the bird mortality. So, what can you do? You could join us. Think of ways to launch an initiative in your town to improve lighting rules, collect bird strike data, and advocate for the birds in the night sky.

So, if you have any questions, I would love to hear them. And I'll stop sharing my screen if I can figure out how to do that. Well, thank you so much, Craig. That was wonderful. And I learned a lot. I took a lot of notes. Um, and in case uh you weren't here in the very beginning, we mentioned that if you do have a question comment, you're welcome to type it in the chat and I'll read it out or we can all look at it together.

Um I had a question to get us started. Uh at the very end you mentioned um trying to launch an initiative with your town. I was wondering if you have any I know it's a big matter but any quick tips for people who are interested and even just like you mentioned a parking lot where you're like why do they have lights on here all the time? Um do you have tips for people who want to reach out uh to the town or Yes, absolutely.

I understand that Westport has taken um uh they have some light pollution ordinances, but it's not really farreaching the way I understand it. Um you would need to go to your town ordinances and do a search for light pollution um or or light controls. We have a set of model ordinances that are free uh from our um website that you could take to your town council and say please adopt these. And it's really stressing those four five points I was talking about.

Um so it's a matter of like when somebody leaves work an hour after those lights are shut off. Um that if lights are on that they are are being shielded. Um, in my town there's a law that states that you cannot have light trespass. That means you cannot have outdoor lighting that extends beyond your property boundary, which helps a lot of people because the main complaint is um coming from people that have a neighbor's light shining in their into their home.

So, uh Sam asks, "Is there any state legislation about this?" Great question. Um, two sessions ago, we had a bill called the lights out bill that did not receive a negative vote and it required that the stateowned buildings shut their lights off from 11:00 at night to 6:00 in the morning. We were asking that they would do this during peak migration. Somebody did an analysis of the financial savings and found that there was going to be millions of savings for taxpayers.

So, they made this year round. Um, but that doesn't go far enough. That's only for the uh u stateowned buildings. So, we need um we're always I'm always looking at ways of introducing legislation. Um so, next session we hope to have something a little bit more extensive than what's there now. So, uh, John Woski says, "I just dropped off the five dark sky tips in my neighbor's mailboxes today." Wonderful. Yeah, if you're, uh, check out your your town ordinances, you may already have a light trespass.

Um, they are actually, uh, by having this light pollution fly go into your eyes, that's prohibiting you from really enjoying your property. And like I was pointing out that it really is bad for your health. Um what John, what what town do you live in? Westport. Okay. Yeah. Something um they they passed some ordinances. I really don't remember. Um here again, one thing I'd like to see is a movement start in every town in in the state.

So if something could really happen start happening in Westport that would be great. Greenwich incidentally just passed some ordinances that pretty much follow all the five points that I had discussed. Any other questions? Well, are you okay if people do think of questions uh if they email you or use the light email address? Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Excellent. And um I don't know if everyone heard this at the beginning, but we did record this uh entire presentation.

So if you do want to share it with others or rewatch it yourself, we'll make it available on our YouTube page. Uh and Lights Out, I think we'll make it available, too. And please come to our website. Uh there's a lot of material that you could use, some model letters to neighbors, um uh a lesson plan if anybody is a teacher for middle school. this lesson plan on how to incorporate uh birds and these window strikes into your lesson into your science curriculum.

Um so all kinds of other good material on it. Great. I'll check that out. I would love to see the lesson plan. Um all right then I want to say thank you once again to Craig and thank you everyone for joining us and uh hope you all have a great night. Thanks everyone. Bye. [Music]