crazy night bugs attracted to light in the 60's

Off-topic
1

I was born in '58 and when camping , and also at home, lights would attract a lot of moths and different flies. They are gone now mostly. It is maybe OK now that I think about it. All those darn bugs flying around the light were kinda a pain.

Seriously, if you tried to play poker using a Coleman lantern in CT , USA in the 60’s , there would be all these bugs. Nasty things, flying all around, banging their heads relentlessly against the lights.

They are gone now. I don’t miss most of them, but some of them were really cool.

2

Millers, Junebugs. And away from the lights, lightening bugs, cicadas. They were great.

3

June bugs come out in the evenings at this time of the year. Wouldn’t miind it if they were gone.

But I do miss fireflies. I don’t see them anywhere anymore.

4

I noticed that.

Where did all the fire-flies go?

I read in some mag the were missing across the country.

5

Could it have anything to do with Firefly getting cancelled?
Hoho

6

No shortage of them in my part of the country!!

SD

:slight_smile:

7

  1. they were attracted to the Moon.

  2. if you can remember the 60s, you weren’t there.

8

I still see moths and bugs on lights but

Swimming in a pool at night.
Back in the 60’s june-bugs would dive bomb. Hundreds of the critters floating in a circular fashion to the pool skimmer.
I remember them crawling on your skin or head.

Never happened in the '70s or after.
Could be because 1000s of houses, miles of road, and gobs of shopping malls that have been added. (Tempe, AZ)

We saw lots of prey-mantis back then too. Which are very rare today. As well as all the jack-rabbits.

9

Back in the 1970’s, I did some weeklong canoe trips down a river in Arkansas. We would camp on the river bank at night. One particular location the Mayflies were unbelieveable. They were attracted to our lanterns and the fire. The bugs were so bad we had to put the lanterns about 30 feet away from where we were. We did not even bother to put out the fire one night and next morning there was 2 inches of dead bugs in a ring around the fireplace.

10

I’ve read in National Geographic that the fireflies and lighning bugs are threatened with extinction.
The reason are the very high usage of lights all over the world and the nights which aren’t real dark nights anymore.
The bugs and flies used their light to attract the females, but the females arent able to find those anymore since there’s to much light around, leading them to a “false positive”.

So the poor bugs and flies don’t have sex anymore and as you know, without sex, no babies. And storks are also become lesser these days, so they might be to busy with shipping human babies instead of some for the lighting bugs.

We will see more species dying out, which is sad but true. :frowning:

The fireflies and lightning bugs are just the beginning.

11

Wow! What mass extinction you wrought on those innocent bugs!

We’ve traced the population drop to the 1970s, but until now, we were unsure of the actual event.

Thanks for solving that for us.

12

It’s true, most of those bugs spend their evenings at the shopping mall now.