“The Darkness Manifesto” both warns about the dangers of light pollution and celebrates the creatures that it threatens.
” , by the Swedish ecologist Johan Eklöf, most churches in southwest Sweden had bat colonies back in the nineteen-eighties, and now most of them don’t.
Agreeably in love with darkness, Eklöf is not entirely a sentimentalist about it. Sex and violence rule the night sky as much as they ruled the drive-in movies that the night sky once superintended. What governs the sunless vistas is not a peaceable kingdom but a fierce contest for life, occasionally made vivid for us by the fiery, bioluminescent nature of its display.
We learn, for instance, of the ghost moths, a species in which the adult males appear in fields in twilight, white as their namesakes and just as evanescent-seeming, floating eerily as they signal to the females—only to mate once and then fall to the ground dead. Mouthless by nature, they, like various others of their order, never feed at all in their adult lives. They do not sow, or reap; they merely fornicate once in the dark and die.
Alongside the spectral ghost moths come the speckled and companionable cabbage moths, as ready for one-night stands as Bobby in“Company.” Only after the sun sets does the adult moth, having crawled from its chrysalis, look for a mate. “The female takes the first step by extending her antennae forward, flapping her wings, and secreting scents, at around ten in the evening,” Eklöf writes.
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