By Aniruddha Dhamorikar
One August, I stayed at a riverside lodge in Melghat, Maharashtra where each tent had a large porch light. One evening, I returned to find mayflies and caddisflies swarming the bulbs, easily a thousand or more at each tent. Drawn from the nearby river, these insects, especially mayflies, emerged from their aquatic cradle, their compound eyes tuned to natural light sources like the moonlit sky. It’s believed they navigate by UV light beaming from above, using it as a celestial compass.
Normally, a mayfly’s short life plays out between one riverbank and the other. But artificial lights lure them far from home, trapping them in an endless loop. With the early monsoon come other winged migrants – alates, the flying forms of termites and ants, who, like the mayflies, follow light into a fatal spiral. What should be a brief, purposeful flight becomes a disoriented journey into the glow.
Winged termites, the colony’s reproductives, are drawn to artificial lights, often losing orientation as they leave the nest to start new colonies. Photo: Ripan Biswas/Sanctuary Photolibrary.
In the past decade, India’s remotest areas have been electrified. With grid power replacing kerosene and solar lamps, moths now gather around bulbs and tube-lights instead of flames. These lights rightly help keep the isolated streets, the porch, as well as backyards alight through the night, and are especially necessary in wilderness areas to reduce sudden encounters with wildlife.
However, night-time lighting has sharply increased in wilderness areas, especially near tourism zones. In nature-centric destinations – often focused on charismatic species like the tiger – the impact of artificial light on lesser-seen lifeforms is overlooked. Premises remain brightly lit through the night, unintentionally attracting thousands of insects to their death. At resort entrances, insect carcasses pile up beneath focus-lights. Open restaurants buzz with insects zapping in UV traps, while pathways swarm with spiders and scorpions drawn to the feast.
With wildlife tourism active for most of the year, these constant lights become deadly traps. As we illuminate forests for visitors, we’re silently wiping out insects vital to ecosystem health. If insects don’t receive the same consideration as other charismatic species in Eco-Sensitive and Buffer Zones, where will they survive?
Monsoon marks an explosion of life – none more striking than the sudden abundance of insects. Among pink foxtails and yellow ground stars that brighten forest trails, butterflies, bees, and beetles flit in and out of view. Monsoon flowers depend on these tiny pollinators, which is why they bloom in hues insects can see best such as violets, blues, whites, and yellows at the short-wavelength end of the light spectrum.
Like us, insects rely on sight, smell, sound, and touch – but tuned to a frequency we cannot perceive. They sniff out mates through pheromones, evade predators like bats with ultrasonic hearing, hunt with lightning speed, and seek out flowers with remarkable accuracy.
Perhaps most intriguing is their inexplicable attraction to light. The phrase “like a moth to the flame” captures a mystery we still haven’t solved. One theory suggests insects navigate by natural light keeping the moon or sky above or behind them to orient themselves. But artificial lights disorient them, trapping them in endless circles as they try to hold the bulb in a fixed position lost in a luminous vortex.
In this age of the documented ‘insect apocalypse’, the impact of unnecessary night lighting in wilderness areas demands urgent attention. In tiger reserves especially, the rise of tourism has brought with it a surge of brightly-lit resorts. While experts debate tourism’s effect on mammals, the silent toll on insects goes largely unnoticed.
It’s not electrification itself that’s the problem. Rural communities use low-wattage bulbs with restraint. The real issue lies with resorts near Protected Areas, flooding the night with harsh lights along porches, paths, pools, restaurants, and signboards.
Built inside Buffer and Eco-Sensitive Zones, these properties often comply with rules meant to protect large mammals, while ignoring the ecological fallout of light pollution. Night after night, artificial lights lure thousands of insects to their death. And in their wake come predators – spiders, reptiles, even birds like Oriental Scops Owls, drongos, and flycatchers – feasting well beyond dusk on this unnatural bounty.
Under a porch light, shed leathery wings of alate termites lie scattered as hunchback ants scavenge the dead. Photo: Anirudhha Dhamorikar.
Just as we ensure we keep quiet on safaris to not disturb wildlife, wildlife tourism can be insect-friendly. Insects are no more dangerous than that table you might stub your toe against. Not all lights attract insects. Bright white lights, incandescent, fluorescent, and mercury lights, and UV lights, fall within the short-wavelength spectrum (the UV light) which insects see, and are drawn to. Whereas low-intensity lights such as LED, yellow, red, and halogen lights, are long-wavelength and do not attract insects unless they are of high wattage (see the box for recommended guidelines on nightlight use).
As I descended the mountain river, the streetlights at the railway station stood eerily empty. Urban spaces, though lit and inhabited, lack the insect diversity our forests once teemed with. This quiet vanishing isn’t just alarming – it’s dangerous. Insects are disappearing rapidly, with nearly 40 per cent of species facing extinction and populations dropping
by up to two per cent each year. Even in Protected Areas, their numbers are in freefall. The consequences of this local depopulation on ecosystems are still unfolding but if we continue to ignore their decline, we risk far more than we understand.
Aniruddha Dhamorikar works as Lead for Species Conservation for WWF-India’s Brahmaputra Landscape based out of Tezpur. He is currently co-writing a book on the moth diversity of Kanha.
