I played a part in a biology experiment 😃

A student placed European dung beetles in a circular arena in the URANIA-Planetarium in Potsdam, and recorded the paths they walked under four different light conditions (no stars, stars, stars + Milky Way, and the previous condition with an additional lamp). It's to some extent a replication of Marie Dacke's famous paper, but with a different species of dung beetle (that doesn't roll dung balls).

Check it out: link.springer.com/article/10.1… #LightPollution #Ecology #Beetles

If this result holds up, it’s potentially big: nature.com/articles/s41558-025…

In short, it implies that #LightPollution is decreasing the efficiency with which #plants remove carbon from the atmosphere. It concludes that artificial light at night increases “#ecosystem respiration” (plants, microbes, and animals releasing carbon dioxide through their activity and growth), but there is no corresponding increase in #photosynthesis.

The result is that plants exposed to ALAN emit more #carbon than they absorb from the #atmosphere. The authors write: “Our findings show that ALAN disrupts the fundamental energetic constraints on ecosystem metabolism, warranting the inclusion of light pollution in global change and carbon–climate feedback assessments.”

#ALAN

Widespread influence of artificial light at night on ecosystem metabolism - Nature Climate Change

The authors combine light intensity data with eddy covariance observations from 86 sites to show that artificial light at night increases ecosystem respiration and alters carbon exchange, with impacts shaped by diel cycles and seasonal dynamics.

^Nature