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Millions of birds die each year in collisions with planes, and airports have used everything from fireworks to breeding dogs to scare them away. Some methods have been relatively efficient, but they are useless after takeoff. The researchers at Purdue University may have come up with a solution.
According to a study published Wednesday in the review, red and blue LEDs drive birds in the opposite direction. peerj.
The lights were used to try to create an "avoidance behavior" in birds before, but the literature to argue which types of light could work was almost non-existent. In collaboration with the USDA Animal and Plant Inspection Service, Purdue researchers are starting to find answers.
"The way we think about this is to give the animal the choice," said Esteban Fernandez-Juricic, a professor of biological sciences at Purdue, who led the study at the Ross Biological Reserve.
Here's how it works: Researchers release a bird (in this case, a brown headed cowbird) and it flies away from them. A few centimeters further, the flight path is divided – one side is lit and the other is not. A single-choice test, in which the bird chooses between a light on and off rather than between two colors, is ideal for measuring avoidance behavior, said Fernandez-Juricic. If the bird goes to the side without light, this light may be a good candidate to warn birds of danger.
The test was repeated with five different wavelengths of light. The birds have systematically avoided LED lights with peaks at 470 and 630 nanometers, which appear blue and red to the human eye. Ultraviolet (UV) light, green light and white light do not generate any obvious pattern of avoidance or attraction.
People have been trying to use UV lamps to hunt birds in the past, based on the idea that birds have better vision in the ultraviolet. These results show that it is probably not an effective approach.
The types of light birds avoided in the study had high levels of chromatic contrast or color differences, but lower achromatic contrast levels, with differences occurring only in gray levels. Whether the results result from light spikes or contrast levels, Fernandez-Juricic is not sure. He hopes to answer this question, as well as how other bird species respond to different types of light, modifying the test and performing more experiments.
"We now have a behavioral test that we can use to test these behaviors of attraction and avoidance in a systematic and standardized way, and we can do it on different species," he said. he declares. "We can test not only whether a light can be very visible to a bird or not, but if that light leads to the behaviors we are trying to generate."
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Material provided by Purdue University. Original written by Kayla Zacharias. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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