NEW PAPER: Ever wondered why insects fly in all sorts of crazy patterns around lights at night? So did we! We set about recording flying insects to work out what's going on. I'll summarise what we found in this 🧵. Spoiler: We don't think they confuse lights with the moon.
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We set out to the cloud forest of Monteverde, Costa Rica to record insects at high speed (500 fps) using 2 cameras. This allowed us to reconstruct trajectories in 3D. We observed several different flight behaviours. The first was orbiting.