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Degraded Darkness
IT'S TEMPTING TO ASSUME that artificial light distresses only a few exquisitely sensitive species. But mounting evidence suggests that disappearing darkness undermines our best conservation efforts.
On a pair of sweltering days one recent July, Sharon Wise and her husband Bryant Buchanan rigged strands of white Christmas lights from tree to tree in the wilderness of Virginia. No nativity scene was in evidence, no plastic reindeer, and certainly no snow. Any neighbors the couple might have impressed with their early display of yuletide spirit were in distant Utica, New York, where both biologists live and teach.
But the redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) that hide all day beneath the leaf litter of Mountain Lake Biological Station certainly took note of the couple’s efforts. When the researchers and three of their students switched on the lights at sunset one evening, the nocturnal salamanders responded with the amphibian equivalent of pulling the covers over their heads. They waited an hour longer than usual to get up for breakfast.
That delay concerns Wise. Under normal conditions, she knows, the salamanders emerge soon after nightfall and forage for just a few hours. But artificial illumination from buildings, road lights, and distant urban glow increasingly bathes organisms that, like Mountain Lake’s redbacks, have adapted to live in the dark.
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