What is the best light for attracting moths?

We want to upgrade the UV lights on our moth traps. We currently use a UV fluorescent tube, but we are thinking about moving to a LED setup, like the LepiLED or EntoLED. We think these will be more reliable in the long term, and are well supported by research.

There seem to be trade-offs:

  • Cost (Higher for LEDs)
  • Attractiveness to moths (colours and brightness)
  • Power consumption (Seems about the same)

We have thought about cheaper LEDs too, but these seem to bring in fewer moths. One option would be to make it easy for people to switch out the UV light used, but then this introduces problems for standardisation of results.




We are about to try that by modifying the new traps that we build. [email protected] will know more about what we have tried so far. One thing that I know he wants to try is to use glass tubes with good transmission properties

If people come to any findings about loght trap lights let us know!

 

Another question i had on this front is about how continuous do light sources need to be?

 

Since us and @Hubertszcz are controlling our lights anyway with an Automated relay, we can potentially reduce power consumption in a couple different ways. For instance (hypothetically) maybe insects wouldn't care if we turned the lights off every 5 seconds for 3 seconds . Maybe they would even prefer blinking lights? Maybe they would hate it even if the light took a 20 second break every 10 minutes?

 

I have no idea, but if anyone else has thoughts, let us know!

We have also thought about these sorts of things. We have chosen to keep the light on continuously for the night, but turn it off before dawn to allow the moths to fly away before predators arrive. 

We are going to be trying out the EntoLEDs and LepiLEDs in Panama in the last two weeks of January, I'll post here on my thoughts.