I’m guessing he’s confusing the dramatic drop in insect life overall with a change in behavior due to different lights.
If you compare an incandescent soft white porch light to a similar brightness soft white led light, you will probably see dramatically more insects at the incandescent bulb. .
> We found that LEDs attracted significantly fewer insects than other light sources, but found no significant difference in attraction between the “cool” and “warm white” LEDs.
Also, not sure about white bulbs, but those color-configurable spotlights definitely emit UV at least when set to anything near blue/purple. They cause certain things to glow. Probably white is doing it too but it's harder to see.
I have a 405nm laser pointer and it makes certain things (any% titanium dioxide) absurdly bright from fluorescence. So you probably aren’t getting UV from those bulbs, but certainly some IR.
Sky is always brighter than the land, moon is not required.
Lamp movement is the confusion of where is “up”
The thing that insects can see and we don't is the rapid flashing of a PWM power controller.
I wonder if these streetlights have power saving fade-ins as the nightfall approaches instead of clicking on at sunset.
Note you can make LEDs dim without PWM via constant current drivers, just less efficient as the duty cycle is 100%, they look much nicer though
Anything more modern than that, even if it has a similar case, will use less power
However, my mind developed a similar conjecture to your's: what if the common frequencies of PWM occur within a kinetic visual blindspot of insect vision, like human saccades [0] in the novel Blindsight [1], so that insects are not aware of the LED at all?
0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10991/
1. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#:~:text=%22There...
They've had many generations to evolve alongside all human false light sources. Insect generations are usually pretty short. Perhaps they just find it evolutionary useful to cluster around human sources of light. Presence of human food, liklihood of bumping into other insects of the same species, warmth, etc.
If human sources of light were interfering somehow, they've had hundreds or thousands of generations to breed out that proclivity.
They didn't say no bug ever goes to any led light.
Insects eyes are biologically very different.
With LED lighting, if you have lots of spot lights in the ceiling and and open door, you’ll likely find that the light leaving the house is a bath of reflection from different sources inside the house and that likely cancels out the worst of the flicker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon-wheel_effect
https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/subjective-strobosco...
Edit; to be clear there is a version of the wagon wheel effect under natural light, I'm just saying that the main one with discrete exposure periods does not occur irl
Try walking outside in a clear night. Look up, notice some stars, or aircraft lights. Now rotate in place, and see how low your vision's FPS is in the dark: the rotation will be visibility jumpy.
An insect, with its much simpler visual processing, and facing a bright light, will likely achieve a much higher FPS, sufficient for the sub-kilohertz flicker to be very visible.
I bought LED "bug lights" — those yellow bulbs that are supposed to be invisible to bugs.
Every bulb in the pack electrically failed within 10 minutes.
I gave up and went back to an incandescent. Still works perfectly.
So sick of the zero-quality LED bulbs that have entirely flooded the market. Of course they had their hand forced by government mandates, people needed mass quantities of cheap bulbs that could match a 75¢ incandescent. They didn't have this problem when LED bulbs were $20 each (and weighed about as much, due to the heat sink).
^ Obligatory Chubbyemu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VtUGoGZtI8
I guess it is most likely some combination of the above, but if there's any evidence it would be a neat reframing
We use UV/IR combo Flame detectors at work for this purpose.