r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/The_Love-Tap • 9h ago

Video An incredible variety of moths attracted to an illuminated sheet. This technique is called light sheeting

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u/inarhtimol 8h ago

I suppose it's some sort of evolutionary thing that we don't want insect going into our eyes/orifices. I think it's the same thing why we don't give a shit about ladybugs but we hate cockroach, if you look at them closely they aren't much different but one has a predictable flight and is slow and the other one doesn't. I would love if an entomologist here had some sort of explanation :)

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u/AsstBalrog 8h ago edited 7h ago

I suppose it's some sort of evolutionary thing that we don't want insect going into our *eyes/*orifices.

Speak for your branch of the tree...

More seriously, though, you raise a good point about ladybugs and roaches. I used to have a natural fish tank, including a 1" snapping turtle. He ignored most things, just didn't move at all, until I dumped in the 1" crayfish I had seined up.

His head swiveled, his gaze locked on one, and from then on, until he had killed them all, he was on an unflinching mission. Something about their shape or the movement of their gills or legs spoke to his reptilian (hah!) brain.

It kind of reminded me of the first Alien movie. John Hurt goes onto the alien ship, and he encounters those pods or whatever. The cover slides back, and there is this movement, exceedingly well done by the SFX team, this irregular, flickering motion that just signals "biological" or "life." I think something like that was what my turtle was responding to.

Anyway, I'm saying that you're probably right about the evo thing, but it's more fine grained than you suggest. Somehow roaches signal disgust or danger, but those cute widdle beetles do not.

Source: Not an entomologist

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u/theevildjinn 1h ago

I had a small insect fly into my ear canal while I was driving. Luckily I had just pulled out of my driveway and was doing about 5 mph with the windows down, because I stopped the car and then had a full-on panic attack.

My wife ran indoors and grabbed a pair of eyebrow tweezers to get it out, I can still picture the sound of it buzzing and burrowing right next to my eardrum, seeming to dig its way further inside with every attempt to get it out. I'm glad that my wife removed it rather than me, because in the state that I was in I'd have probably ruptured my own eardrum with the tweezers.