Jornadas Online Sobre Contaminación Lumínica y Aves Marinas en la Macaronesia 2020

Good afternoon and welcome. I’m Yarci Acosta, coordinator for SEO/BirdLife in the Canaries. We start these sessions on light pollution and seabirds. Organised by SEO/BirdLife We start these sessions on light pollution and seabirds. Organised by SEO/BirdLife and SPEA, within the framework of the LuMinAves project. From today until the day after tomorrow, Thursday 26, we will have the opportunity to listen to participants from almost a dozen countries who will update us on the most relevant research on light pollution, and who will share experiences and successful cases in their respective countries.

00:43 - I’d like to clarify that, as a consequence of the health situation and to avoid technical problems, it has been decided to pre-record the interventions. In any case, at the end of the technical presentations there will be an opportunity to interact with the speakers in the chat, on-line. Now, without further ado, I leave you with the opening speech of this conference, which will start with José Antonio Valbuena Alonso, counselor of Ecological Transition, Fight against Climate Change and Territorial Planning for the Government of the Canary Islands. This will followed by Filipe M. Porteiro, the regional director of Sea Affairs for the Government of Azores. Next, Isabel García Hernández, insular counselor of Natural Environment and Safety Management, for the Island Council of Tenerife.

01:28 - Then, Manuel Amador Jiménez, director of Environment for the Island Council of Gran Canaria. Domingos Leitão, executive director of the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds. SPEA. Then to conclude with Asunción Ruiz, executive director of the Spanish Ornithological Society. SEO/BirdLife. Then, after the opening speech, Pep Arcos, head of SEO/BirdLife’s marine program, and myself, will give a short introductory presentation that will give way to the technical part of the day. We hope you will enjoy it. And now, without further delay, I leave you with José Antonio Valbuena, counselor of Ecological Transition, Fight against Climate Change and Territorial Planning for the Government of the Canary Islands.

02:08 - We thank him greatly for his participation and for the government’s involvement in the project. Thank you very much. Thank you, good afternoon. And first of all, I want to send a cordial greeting to all of those attending these conferences, send a cordial greeting to all of those attending these conferences, conferences which are obviously important. conferences which are obviously important. Important because, as you all know, the Government of the Canary Islands has set itself, as a primary objective, the climate action. And climate action means not only to reduce the pollution caused by the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, allowing somehow, the mitigation of its effects. But it also means, most importantly, to adapt.

02:49 - Adapt, after all, to this maelstrom that society has gotten into in recent decades, or, more specifically, in the last two and a half centuries when we have lost something we used to have naturally, which is our harmony with our natural spaces, harmony with nature, harmony with all living beings, with whom we share the same territory, with whom we share a planet. And unfortunately, in a very marked way through the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, we have seen how their natural habitats are being unjustly altered in a very substantial way beacause of necessities that, as time has shown, perhaps were not needs that had to be solved. Therefore, now it is time to reverse this situation. And in a specific case such as birds, one of the more delicate species in the chain, in the vital chain, in the chain of biodiversity in our planet, along with marine species, need special attention. And obviously, programs like this and the work carried out by SEO/BirdLife, are very important aspects, with which the public administrations should be involved.

04:10 - Already, in my previous stage, as counselor for the island of Tenerife, there was a firm commitment to the protection of birds. We resolutely promoted the campaigns for shearwaters, with the involvement of the Island Council of Tenerife. Support was given to programs that, sponsored by SEO/ BirdLife, carried out tests to reduce light pollution in specific spots in the island of Tenerife, with highly positive results. And now the plan is, from the Government of the Canary Islands, from the position that I now occupy, to provide with all the legal instrumentation that as a Government we can formulate. Luckily, Governments can formulate laws, and one of the laws that we are promoting, within the regulatory “ecosystem”, is precisely the Law of Biodiversity and Natural Heritage, or Natural Resources.

05:03 - In the end, it is a law that will give due wheight to biodiversity, for the protection of our species, in their behalf against other exotic species that may be invasive, but most importantly, in the specific area that concerns us, it will establish, legally, the protection of our soils, our skies, and therefore restrict light pollution in all the eight Canary Islands. We are now in process of expansion to replace current luminaires with less polluting LED luminaires. Pollution can not only be measured as air pollution, or as the greenhouse gases associated, but also in the damage done to other elements of our natural environment, such as biodiversity, which we must protect. And therefore, we have a pending issue in the reduction of light pollution. An increasing number of bird species are seriously endangered in our planet.

06:09 - The Canaries are a spot, an important point, within the protection of birds. Not only for those that inhabit them, but also for those that take the Canary Islands as a passage in their natural migratory processes. And therefore, we have a pending issue in regard to reducing light pollution. Not only because of the effects it may have on climate change, but also for the very positive effects it can have on improving recovery and protection ratios of the avifauna population that inhabit the whole of Macaronesia. Therefore, this is an important project, a project where, according to the agenda, will not only go on about the problems associated with light pollution, but also about proposals to solve this issue, which will be brought out in the first part.

07:11 - And these proposals, I can guarantee you, will have a strong support from the Government of the Canary Islands. The Law of Biodiversity and Natural Resources, or Natural Heritage, which we hope to be able to take to the Governing Council for a first reading by the end of next year, is going to be an important milestone. And we want, by the end of this term, to have that regulatory ecosystem composed by the Climate Change Law, where full importance is given to the protection of biodiversity, Circular Economy Law, Biodiversity and Natural Resources Law, and then, the fourth of these laws, the Soil law, which will be renamed as Territory Law because that is precisely what this law has to do, harbour the needs that the other three laws are going to disclose. So, let’s start talking about protection, the debate on how to expand has been left behind, it was aborted in the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, therefore, It is no longer about expanding, but about recovering the natural harmony that human beings should have with the rest of species, animals, that inhabit planet Earth. And along these lines, sessions like this one and the conclusions that emanate from them, from this project, will be very much welcomed by the committed Government of the Canary Islands.

08:27 - And what’s more, to the best of our abilities, we will pick up as many gauntlets as may there be extended to us to boost them, and to continue providing solutions, to what currently are problems. Therefore, thank you very much for the opportunity given to the Government of the Canary Islands to participate with this brief intervention. And we encourage you to repeat these forums and initiatives, projects like these and like many others that are in the hirtory of SEO BirdLife, without which, evidently, we’d have a weak point in this protective task that all governments must undertake. Thank you very much Councillor. We give way now to Isabel García Hernández, Inter-island Councillor of Management Area of the Natural Environment and Safety, of the Inter-island Council of Tenerife. Good morning, thank you for inviting me to this presentation.

09:23 - And I want to congratulate you for organizing these conferences, which are the culmination of a close collaboration with SEO/BirdLife, which are the culmination of a close collaboration with SEO/BirdLife, a very productive and interesting collaboration. a very productive and interesting collaboration. For the council of Tenerife, It is an honour to go hand in hand with an organization with such an extensive experience and trajectory in the protection of birds and of our biodiversity in general. These conferences are important to strengthen the ties between different organizations, between different associations, and to share experiences that allows us to advance in the solutions and correction of the negative impacts of urban development, of night lighting in the coastline, that is causing that seabirds fall onto the ground. The solution to this problem, from the Council of Tenerife, is approached as a as a planning, a management, which goes hand in hand both with the territorial part, so that the urban development will be increasingly respectful and controlled, and also with the management aspect, active management, so that it is possible to provide assistance to all seabirds that are dazzled, disoriented, and that come ashore and are not able to take flight again.

10:49 - This is where management becomes essential, and in this regard, the Council of Tenerife is very active. From the Area of Management of the Natural Environment we are supporting the conservation of birds through the Wildlife Recovery Center “La Tahonilla”. And every year we set a specific campaign for the collection of shearwater fledglings which, fortunately, also has the collaboration of many people, volunteers, willing to participate in this action. The Wildlife Recovery Center in La Tahonilla is in charge of coordinating the collection, recovery and release of these fledglings during the campaign, Here, we coordinate with the local police, with the municipalities, and we have a good percentage of success, of the 2 500 shearwater chicks that we have been collected as in this last campaign, practically all of them were returned to the sea. In this campaing, so far this year, the estimated number is lower, which is also good news, three times fewer shearwater fledglings have fallen, in comparison with other years, and this has various explanations.

One reason for this is that it has coincided with the full moon, 12:05 - precisely during this period, that serves shearwaters as a natural guide to orient themselves and fly in a controlled way, and at the same time, another reason is, of course, the issue of the COVID-19 pandemic, that has disrupted hotels and many tourist infrastructures, leaving them with no lights, and while they are turned off, the shearwaters were lucky in this regard. These data should not make us fall into a false sense of security, we must continue reflecting on how to improve the entire environment so that biodiversity and its interrelation with human beings are increasingly beneficial for birds and for nature in general. Moreover, the data from this last campaign should allow us to rationalize the lighting of our spaces, as we all agree. It is also the intention of this Island Council to agree with the hotel sector of municipalities like Adeje, municipalities of the south of Tenerife, where fallen shearwaters are most commonly found in recent years, so that these municipalities agree to lower the light intensity of the streets, or hotels. And start a commitment. We had planned to get this agreement by the year 2020, to advance this cause, but with the issue of the pandemic we, effectively, left this agreement for a later date, but it is clear that we want to continue giving firm steps in lowering the light intensity of certain areas, where it is demonstrated that it is where more shearwaters fall, precipitously, and with a higher frequency.

13:56 - And therefore, the Cabildo will continue working in this way so that shearwaters are better conserved, have fewer accidents and, consequently, contribute to their recovery and its “non-extinction”. In essence, we thank SEO/BirdLife for the support they give to this council to undertake actions of this type, we know that they are continuously supporting the actions carried out by this council. Thank you and congratulations for this conference, this project, and wish that this collaboration extends over time and we can reissue it, and continue collaborating as we have done so far, for the sake of nature, for the sake of biodiversity. for the sake of nature, for the sake of biodiversity. I always say that the presence of birds is equal to health, and we have to take steps in this direction and continue advancing, as we have done so far. To everyone, thank you so much. Thank you very much Counsellor.

The next speaker is Manuel Amador Jiménez, 15:04 - Director of Environment Department of the Inter-island Council of Gran Canaria. Thank you very much Yarci, thanks a lot to SEO Birdlife for this invitation to the council for the presentation of this seminars, thanks a lot to SEO Birdlife for this invitation to the council for the presentation of this seminars, Thanks a lot also to the 14 partners, a project like this one, Thanks a lot also to the 14 partners, a project like this one, where there is such a high number of partners, is not an easy project to manage, and I believe that we can be very satisfied with the way this project has proceeded, which is coming to an end, in 2020. And we hope for similar actions, or comparable actions, in the future. Because I think that light pollution is now growing into a problem, a more delicate problem, and we are trying to tackle it with very small measures. Therefore all efforts made regarding the issues of light pollution will be welcome.

Not only does it prevent stargazing 15:59 - and observation of the sky for the people, but also involves problems, even health problems, for the people. In urban environments it can alter the biological clock, it can modify people’s sleep-wake cycles, it can cause affective disorders and accelerated aging on people, but what possibly worries us the most, in the Environment Council, is the impact that it may have on biodiversity, for it obviously affects invertebrates which are, in the trophic chain, the main element to feed birds, and they’re not only food for birds, but also ease the pollination of plants. If invertebrates stop doing this activity obviously the flowering of many species of flora will remain, well, unfertilized, without pollen, and may have problems. Many insects have nocturnal habits and are being dazzled, and therefore they are more easily depredated or they suffer deaths from exhaustion, they start to move around lights and stop doing their functions of fertilization and also feeding, as that is the life cycle, the birds and other vertebrates such as reptiles, etcetera. They could also place their eggs in inappropiate places and consequently a part of the population of these invertebrates get lost.

17:31 - Obviously, it also affects birds and turtles, birds and turtles trusts… well, we don’t know exactly if they use either the reflection of the stars or the moon as a navigational reference, light pollution prevents that aswell and there is a deadly attraction to light, they get exhausted in circular flights… there are collisions because they get confused, etcetera. That is to say, a very important impact is being noticed on birds. Something similar happens to turtles, instead of going into the sea, where they should, they move towards light reflections.

18:08 - There are cases, like in Costa Rica and in some other places, where instead of going into the sea ​​they end up in the middle of maritime avenues that are illuminated, as they are confused by this light. This also not only affects shearwaters, which I believe is a model example, and turtles, it also affects our diurnal birds. Diurnal birds that lengthen their life cycle, which in some cases prevent them from resting, and for nocturnal birds it also hinders their ability to hunt because they are much more visible, and it’s harder for them to sustain. Therefore it is a complex problem, for the human being, we are almost prevented from seeing the sky, this is obviously true, and even have health issues, but what concerns the Environment Council of Gran Canaria the most, is the issue of biodiversity. Public administrations should preserve the natural conditions of night hours as much as possible, in benefit of flora, fauna, and ecosystems in general.

19:15 - This is contained in the Law ⁴²⁄₂₀₀₇, the law of biodiversity, and I believe that as local authorities we should do even more than the work underway. We must prevent, minimize and correct the effects of light pollution in the night sky and also in particular for astronomical observatories, which its scientific research depends on whether there are dark skies, skies where you can actually see the sky I want to thank Yarci Acosta and SEO Birdlife this invitation, may these sessions be fruitful. I was in Madeira in October of 2019, I learned a lot and in my opinion you also have the opportunity, since we are concluding this project, to extract some impressions for the future and join forces for what matters most to us in this project, which is, trying to reduce light pollution. Thank you all very much and may this sessions be fruitful Thank you Manuel. We continue with Domingos Leitao, Executive Director of the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds. Domingos Leitao has the floor. Hello everyone.

“SPEA” is a non-governmental environmental organization, 20:31 - Hello everyone. “SPEA” is a non-governmental environmental organization, whose mission is to work for the study and protection of birds and their habitats, whose mission is to work for the study and protection of birds and their habitats, promoting a development that guarantees the viability of the natural heritage, for our enjoyment, and that of future generations. We know that seabirds are one of the most threatened groups of birds in the entire world. With many species in danger of extinction, and others facing a very pronounced population decline. There are many reasons for these events, and most of them are related to the irresponsible way in which humanity treats the ocean, and the excessive explotation of marine resources.

21:22 - Seabirds are affected in the islands and coasts, where they reproduce, by the introduction of invasive species, habitat destruction and by disturbances caused by human activities. And seabirds are also being affected at sea by overfishing that affects their food, by accidental mortality in fishing gear, by the plastics that we throw every day into the ocean, and they are also greatly affected by climatic changes. I think we all agree if to say that we do not want a sea without seabirds. Never without seabirds. What would have become, for example, of the Portuguese and Castilian navigators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries if seabirds had not helped them find their way to discover new islands and new coastal areas? The fishermen who throughout time always used the movements of seabirds as indicators of good fishing areas. And of the ecosystem services, we know that large colonies of seabirds provide in the nutrient cycle and in the maintenance of biodiversity on the marine, continental and island coasts.

22:47 - That is why the “LuMinAves” project was very important, because it allowed us to know, minimize and reduce the impact of artificial public lighting on seabirds. Today, thanks to the “LuMinAves” project, we know about habitats like the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands and the species of seabirds that are most affected by excessive artificial light. Today we also have well-organized campaigns and more adequate infrastructures for the rescue of the bird nests most affected by this problem. We save thousands of birds every year, for example in the Azores alone there are almost 10,000 “cagarras” or shearwaters that are saved every year in the rescue campaigns for seabirds. For the SPEA, all the information collected and all the capacity implemented by the “LuMinAves” colleagues is very important.

23:48 - We also know that many birds weren’t saved, that, we believe, is the most important. And that is why, in this context, we know that we have to solve the problem at its roots and not just be satisfied with minimizing this impact. Thus the importance of “LuMinAves”, the first steps taken to solve this problem at its source. To solve the problems of excessive public lighting at its source. They were the pioneering decisions taken by some municipalities, for example the municipality of Corvo in the Azores, the municipality of Santa Cruz in Madeira and others as well, to turn off or substantially reduce public light in certain localities and in certain days and hours.

That saved thousands of birds, preventing them from being attracted and deviating from their usual routes. We consider that the example of these municipalities, which were strongly involved with “LuMinAves”, will be followed and perfected by others in order to solve in a more effective way the impacts of excessive light pollution on seabirds. And also, why not mention it, contribute to the health of citizens, because the excess of light causes serious problems for people. And contribute to the majority of public finances, because spending electrical energy on excessive lighting is not sustainable nor beneficial to any municipality. Therefore the “SPEA” is willing to continue working in future partnerships with public and private entities, in “de-illumination” projects with the results of “LuMinAves” and in projects for the application of these reduction and prevention measures tested in the “LuMinAves” project.

25:50 - To finish I would like to congratulate the colleagues of “LuMinAves” project to “SEO Birdlife”, to the Government of Azores, to the Institute of Forests and Conservation of Nature of Madeira, to “SPEA”, as well as to all the other entities and people who were involved in this project and in the work carried out. And I wish you all a very profitable year. And thank you all very much. Thank you Domingo. Now, to end the opening of the conference, Asunción Ruiz, Executive Director of the Spanish Ornithological Society. Thank you very much, Yarci. As Executive Director of SEO Birdlife, the doyen organization in Spain in this difficult task of conserving biodiversity, it is a great pleasure to be here today, at the inauguration of a project that came to study an unknown threat, light pollution, towards a group of birds, the most threatened in the world, seabirds. I would like to start by appreciating the 14 partners who have been part of this great work that today it’s concluded with these seminars.

27:13 - And thank everyone, all the scientists who will be part of the first block, which is the one providing us with scientific evidences of how light pollution is jeopardizing seabirds. Scientists from Australia, UK, Germany, Portugal, the Azores… I mean, from Portugal, both from Azores and Madeira. From Spain and even the US. And also give a sincere appreciation to all of those who will be conveying, in the second block of seminars, case studies and lessons learned. For SEO Birdlife, as a conservation organization that uses birds as a banner and as a thermometer of the state of health of the environment, it is a real honor to be here, be part of this forum.

28:20 - And also say that, of course, SEO Birdlife not solely and exclusively works with what is presented or analyzed today, which is light pollution. SEO Birdlife has worked for the conservation of this group of birds in all fronts, from the incidental capture of seabirds by fishing gear to the pollution of the sea itself. But perhaps, today is an important date, because we are putting on the table the latest evidence, practical cases and improvements, to put an end to the threat that is light pollution. I cannot fail to mention a great partner for us in this project, which is the partner of Birdlife in Portugal, the SPEA, because together we have walked this path. And as CEO, I think I have nothing further to add I sincerely hope that you have very fruitful sessions, for the sake of seabirds, and the sake of biodiversity.

29:48 - Because today, more than ever, amidst the sad consequences of this pandemic, we know that to conserve biodiversity, is to preserve our quality of life and our future. Thanks you very much. Many thanks to Asunción and the rest of the participants in this opening on behalf of the Government of the Canary Islands, the Coucils of Gran Canaria and Tenerife, the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds and SEO /BirdLife. These last two, being organizers of this conference. Now, is the time to put the context on the table. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll share the screen. Here it is. Ready! Well, as I was saying, these conferences that will take place between today Tuesday and the day after tomorrow, Thursday, November 26, can be followed on the SEO / BirdLife YouTube channel.

It is a conference 31:14 - that is organized within the framework of the LuMinAves Project, of which I will talk a about a little, later. These conferences are intended to become a meeting point for researchers, civil society and decision-makers in the management of natural resources. They are an occasion or are intended to be an occasion to catch up on the state of knowledge in terms of light pollution, an extremely serious and at the same time unknown threat. as we will see in the coming days. To do this, we will largely use seabirds as witnesses to the impact of this threat, although not as the only victim of course. It is also the occasion to bring to the table the experience of other places that face the same problem to try to identify possible solutions that are replicable.

From the organizational 32:11 - point of view, after this opening, the conference will be developed in two blocks. A first block on the phenomenon and its impacts and a second block on practical cases, as I have just mentioned. Prior to the first block, we will have a presentation by Pep Arcos, Head of the SEO / BirdLife Marine Program, who will help us to put ourselves in context about Seabirds, let’s say it is the animal group that this conference revolves around, although, as I have mentioned, light pollution obviously affects the ecosystem as a whole. In the first block we will have Doctors Franz Hölker, Theresa Jones, Svenja Tidau, Travis Longcore and Airam Rodríguez, all of them leading researchers in their fields of study. In the second block we will have participants from the Canary Islands, the Azores, Phillip Island in Australia and Madeira. As you can see in the program.

It is important to note that due to the health situation we 33:26 - have been forced to organize this conference remotely, it was not our initial intention, and that also , due to technical reasons, we have decided to pre- record the presentations. In any case, at the end of each presentation the speakers will be available for approximately 10 minutes or a quarter of an hour, to resolve any doubts that may have arisen. In other words, you can ask all the questions you want in the chat. As I mentioned at the beginning, this conference is organized within the framework of the LuMinAves Project. LuMinAves is the acronym, the real title of the project is: “Light Pollution and Conservation of Archipelagos of Macaronesia Reducing the Harmful Effects of Artificial Light on Seabird Populations” Well, a project that started in 2019 and ends this year, in 2020, funded by the European Union through the Territorial Cooperation Program Interreg MAC 2014-2020 A project that has 13 partners from those archipelagos: the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands.

34:33 - In the Canary Islands the partners are the Ecological Transition Council, Fight Against Climate Change and Territorial Planning of the Government of the Canary Islands, SEO / BirdLife itself as project leader, as well as the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands and the Councils of Gran Canaria, Tenerife and Fuerteventura. In Madeira we have the Society for the Study of Birds, SPEA, which also organizes this conference, the Forest and Nature Conservation Institute, and the Madeira Electricity Company. And in the case of Azores, the Regional Directorate for Marine Affairs, the Regional Fund for Science and Technology and the Municipal Chamber of Corvo, as well as the Electric Company of Azores. This project starts from a common problem in Macaronesia, which is the impact of light pollution on seabirds and is articulated around three axes: Knowledge and conservation, Governance, and Dissemination. Very briefly, in terms of knowledge, the truth is that a very important effort has been made during three years.

Biological parameters have been studied in different colonies, 35:42 - in the case of the Canary Islands in Tenerife, where some 2,000 nests have been visited, of Cinderella Shearwater and Bulwer’s petrels during this three-year period. Also in Madeira, a census of Cinderella Shearwater was carried out between 2017 and 2018. In the Azores abundance has been estimated, other locations of shearwaters have been made in areas free from the impact of predation and light pollution, pollution mapping of the three archipelagos has been carried out using satellite data and information on accident rate obtained from the various rescue campaigns that are launched. Those are some of the actions that have been carried out. Regarding governance, the project has supported an improvement in the taking of data from dazzled bird rescue campaigns and standardization of management protocols for these birds.

In addition, a strategy and action plan have been drawn up jointly 36:44 - on light pollution in Macaronesia, which will be presented during this conference by Azucena De La Cruz, who is Coordinator of SPEA in the Azores. And the last of the axes on which we have worked is that of awareness and dissemination. A very remarkable effort has also been made here Producing different informative material such as an animated short, which can also be seen on YouTube by typing “SOS Pardelas”. Aimed not exclusively to children, but with an approach oriented to this age group. An online teaching unit has been developed, and a good number of activities have been organized in which thousands of people have participated in the three archipelagos.

37:40 - Finally, I thank again all the participants. And with no further delay we leave you with Pep Arcos, Head of the SEO / BirdLife Marine Program, who he will put on the table, try to tell you a little about seabirds and the threats that affect them, so that we have a starting point from which better understand the rest of the presentations. Thank you very much Yarci. Thank you very much Yarci. I’m going to talk a bit about the context. Not the specific issue of seabirds I’m going to talk a bit about the context. Not the specific issue of seabirds and lights, but to give a more general context to seabirds and their problems and a bit of the work we do in SEO in this regard. Beyond the LuMinAves project.

38:36 - Seabirds are predators of the marine environment, that is, they are found in the highest ranks in the marine trophic chains and as such, they integrate everything that happens in the ecosystem. At the lower levels through the food chain they end up integrating that knowledge. That what is happening. This makes them good indicators of the state of conservation of the environment, but it also makes them very sensitive to all kinds of threats. Furthermore, they are especially sensitive to those threats that cause direct mortality because it is a group with a high longevity. Most species tend to have lives of several decades and at the same time their reproduction is rather slow, many species lay only one egg a year, they do not lay every year, they begin to breed when they are several years old and that means that if we increase mortality, this life expectancy is reduced but they do not have the ability to compensate it because they cannot increase reproduction rates.

At the same time, they have 39:58 - great mobility. They alternate between land to breed and the open sea to feed, they can travel thousands of kilometers and that makes them encounter threats at different times in their life cycle and therefore that they get exposed for several various reasons. Well, we must bear in mind that the marine and coastal environments are very humanized environments in which there is intense human pressure and therefore threats can be diverse. This makes seabirds, of all birds, one of the most threatened groups there is. You can see here that on the left there is the column corresponding to the world set of birds, which are about 11,000 species, and you can see that the ones that are most threatened are these colors: Red for critically endangered, orange for endangered, yellow for vulnerable.

Then, this lighter green ifor the considered 41:04 - to be almost threatened; according to the categories of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Well, the total of birds has little more than 20% of species between threatened and almost threatened, and on the other hand, in seabirds we are almost halfway there. Also, if we look especially at the Pelagic species such as the Procellariiforms which are shearwaters, petrels and Storm-Petrels, - which is a group that has special relevance in Macaronesia - we can see that the proportion of threatened species is even higher with several critically endangered species. In other words, in real danger of extinction. While the coastal ones, sorry, the coastal ones would not be so affected.

Coastal understood as species such as gulls, terns, cormorants and others. Beyond these categories of threat, a recent study revealed that in 60 years, From 1950 to 2010, global seabird populations had fallen by 70%. In other words, the average abundance or the total abundance of seabirds had fallen by 70%. Which is a a very considerable decline and that is consistent with this situation of generalized threat. Within this context, we must remember that in Spain we have a very, very large diversity of species of seabirds.

We have different biogeographic regions and therefore great 42:53 - opportunity for very diverse species. And in the area of ​​the Canary Islands, especially, as I mentioned, the group of the Procellariiforms, which are basically the shearwaters. Such as the most characteristic and emblematic, the Cory’s Shearwater, which you have here marked with a red circle. It is the most common species that breed in the archipelago, in the Canary Islands, in Madeira and Azores. Then we have other species of shearwaters such as the Macaronesian Shearwater and the Manx Shearwater, that are much more threatened.

And then we have several species of Storm Petrels as well as, 43:34 - here on the right, the Bulwer’s Petrel. All of them deserve attention for being sensitive species and all of them sensitive in particular to the issue of lights, which is what brings us together here today. Beyond the issue of the lights, I’d like to comment a little on the general threats that the group faces highlighting especially those threats that affect, well, that cause direct mortality in adults, which, as I mentioned at the beginning, is a very sensitive demographic parameter. And we have predation by introduced species of rats, cats; in their breeding colonies. That is, many of these birds breed on islands such as Macaronesia, where there were no land predators naturally and they arrived with humans and this has represented a pressure on species that had no defense against them.

Then also the accidental 44:41 - capture of seabirds in fishing gear, which is an issue that is not intentional but that exists, also has a very important impact on many spices. And then we have other issues that may be more or less important depending on the species and depending on the area, such as pollution including light, climate change, etc. Here simply a graph of a revision work in which they tried to quantify the degree of threat of different species according to the type of pressure. And we saw that the invasive species introduced, the predation that I was commenting on is the main problem in terms of species affected. Accidental catch would be the second factor.

And then here we have that light pollution 45:40 - is a little further away, but we must bear in mind that maybe at the level of all seabirds it is not such an important problem, but at the level of certain species it is. And this is the case, for example, of many of the shearwaters and Storm petrels that breed in Macaronesia. And just to close, a little brushstroke regarding the work we do in the marine field in SEO / BirdLife. Well, here is a small list, but I shall comment on them in a little more detail. To begin with, it is very important to have follow-up programs that allow us to study and understand what is happening, and to be able to make the right decisions with knowledge of the facts.

46:33 - At the level of monitoring programs, it is important to monitor the reproduction in the breeding colonies, understand their demographics, we do work - for example censuses at sea and markings to also know the ecology at sea - and well, different volunteer programs that also provide diverse information. And at the level of other aspects of conservation, it has been played a prominent role together with SPEA in the identification of areas important for birds at the sea level and their subsequent protection through the Natura 2000 Network as Special Protection Zones for Birds (ZEPA). Here are the results of a project that we had in 2004 and 2009, both SEO and SPEA, in which several candidate areas to be protected for seabirds in the sea were identified. And this would be at the level of Spain, a result of what this type of inventory led to which is the protection of a series of areas. Here is a map of Red Natura 2000 that includes both the ZEPAs and LICs , which would be for other species or for habitats.

But let’s say that in 2014 we got a 48:02 - protection of these marine spaces and now what is being worked on, especially through the INDEMARES project, is in the consolidation of these spaces, in finishing addressing knowledge gaps and develop management plans as well as governance models for these spaces. In SEO, an aspect that we work a lot on, due to what we have seen of the problem of accidental catches, is working with fishermen to find solutions that are agreed by all. We work both with fishermen on the ground assessing the problem and seeking solutions, and at the political level to try to engage the attention of politicians. And well, we are developing some projects currently with the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund. And just keep in mind that the approach is collaborative and it is about accidental catches which are not wanted by fishermen, and what we want is to work with them to make them see that the problem is not only theirs, but also of the birds and of the ecosystem, and look for solutions that are a bit like brainstorming as a group, as it is easier to find what solutions may be feasible. We also work with predators.

In this case, we must highlight the work we are doing in Menorca where a colony 49:37 - of Balearic Shearwater, the most threatened species of seabird in Europe, is threatened by the presence of various predators, including cats that have the highest incidence. Work is being done, reproduction is being monitored, reproduction in nest boxes is being facilitated, predators are being monitored with camera traps. And the idea is to install… well, this colony is on an isthmus, that is, on a peninsula, sorry, and the idea is to install a barrier on the isthmus. An anti-predator barrier that prevents access by predators and then do some kind of program to ensure there are none left inside either. Well, the issue of pollution, Here we highlight the issue of light pollution.

But that is 50:39 - going to be talked about at length today. And therefore, I do not lengthen although we also adress other issues such as hydrocarbon spills among others. And just as final notes I think it’s alright a bit of reflection, to bear in mind that it is essential for any type of action to have good data, good information and that it is well analyzed, well treated; to make a good diagnosis and really know what is necessary, how to act. It’s very important to identify problems well and act when and where necessary. Not to over-manage. Not wanting to act when you don’t have to. Not to mislead with unapproachable problems.

51:33 - Here we simply say that at each level of management, there are certain responsibilities and sometimes we find that the local manager, who can do little about the great problem of marine pollution by plastics for example, obviously you can do pedagogy, you can do cleanings, but that won’t fix the problem. You have to act on a much more global level. So, we must not mislead saying that these problems are the most important and forget about those that we can manage at a local level. And really be brave and manage that which should be managed, such as the issue of lights, such as the issue of predators, or the issue of fishing; that require a much more local approach. And it is good to remind you, to end insisting on the idea that for any action it is very important to include all the interested parties, all those being affected with which we avoid or at least minimize misunderstandings and we optimize the effectiveness of any action. And with this I shall end. Thanks a lot. Good morning, Franz is the first lecturer of this workshop.

00:02 - Good morning, Franz is the first lecturer of this workshop. Good morning, Franz is the first lecturer of this workshop. I’m going to start speaking English because, that is how I’ll comunicate with him Hi Franz, how are you? Hey, hey, very good, it’s nice! Nice to meet you! Hey, hey, very good, it’s nice! Nice to meet you! Nice to meet you too! It’s my pleasure having Franz involved in this workshop. Nice to meet you too! It’s my pleasure having Franz involved in this workshop. Before starting with his presentation, I would like to introduce him to all of you.

00:34 - Franz is a biologist and he did his doctoral thesis in 1999 at the University of Hamburg. Since 2008 he is a senior researcher and group director at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. The IGB in Berlin. He has been director of the Ecology Department of the IGB from 2012 to 2017. He was the researcher in charge of the cause action “Loss of the Night”, from 2010 to 2014 That cause action was a network, that allowed contact and collaboration of European scientists from 18 countries. That was a really important action cause to our issues of light pollution.

01:32 - He also has directed the Illuminating Lake Ecosystems project and he has published many research papers on the impact of light pollution and on university. And today he will go, we will talk about pollution and obviously biodiversity. Franz up to you, is all yours, your time. Thanks Yeah, thanks a lot Airam for the nice introduction, and I will talk today about light pollution as a biodiversity threat. And I would like to start with this figure which shows the Earth, and there is also the problem, because life is rhythm, since billions of years the Earth rotates around it’s axis every 24 hours and it orbits the Sun every 365 days. so many processes in nature are rhythm, not only light, it’s also temperature, other biotic processes and also biotic processes that are directly connected to this.

And of course most organisms 02:42 - have evolved internal clocks controlled by day, night and seasonal cycles. So if you talk about light pollution, you have to think about the night, and night is half of the story on Earth. On half of the Earth is always night, that is the reason why that high percentage of organisms are nocturnal 30% of vertebrates and more than 60% of invertebrates are nocturnal, they have adapted to the extremely low light situations of the night by evolving and developing low light sensors, for instance. And many body functions become rhythmic because of this changes of day and night: sleep, wake, performance, blood pressure, heart frequency, body temperature, digestive activities and hormones. And this is not only true for humans, here it is quite well understood already, it is also the case for other mammals, for plants and even for microorganisms.

03:52 - Humans are the only species that are able to turn on and off the light wherever they want to do this, and they do it since a few decades, to transport to travel from point A to B on land, in water, to work during the night to run, so to say, the 24 hour-seven society. But by these activities by using light at night they completely transform nocturnal nightscapes. During a time, where humans as a diurnal organisms have adapted over millions of years to be, to rest at night and because many processes, physiological processes, like repair processes, regeneration processes, are taken place during the night. So this since the invention of light, artificial light increased dramatically, so in recent decades there was an increase of global average light emissions of 3-6% during the second half of the 20th century, and in a study that was published a few years ago over a time period from 2012 to 2016, the results increase to 22.2% per year, in light levels, but also increase in the areas that are illuminated.

05:19 - The problem is, light has been introduced in places, times and intensities at which it does not naturally occur. Many organisms have had no chance really to adapt to this new situation. I would like to start with vertebrates, and mainly with physiological aspects in vertebrates, and as I told you 30% of the vertebrates are nocturnal and it seems that younger groups, vertebrate groups, evolved more and more into the night, with the exception of the amphibians maybe. And I would like to present you the results of a study that was just published by us, it was about light and melatonin production. Melatonin is a night hormone, so all, many many organisms produce this night hormone, not only vertebrates, also other animals, even plants can produce it, and it fulfills a very important role, it informs cells and organs in the body, which are blind to the environment of course, about the time of the day.

And normally, for us for instance, we produce 06:37 - melatonin during the night and suppress the production during the day. So it’s quite clear that melatonin level in the blood is informing all different organs in the body about time of the day and they can adapt, adjust, their processes, night processes, physiological and behavioral process will take place during the night and day processes during the day. And if this is mixed because the differences are no longer clear, then we already know that this can result in many many problems. But I would like to start with a natural light situation, so in and the Canary Islands for instance, during a nice summer day you can reach levels of up to 120 lux on the on the ground, twilight starts below 800 lux, the full moon can produce 0.3 lux, this is a really exceptionaly high value, most times 0.1-0.2 lux, and starlight is producing 0.001 lux.

07:45 - Light pollution now, is polluting this kind of natural light, as you can have outdoor lighting levels, direct light by street lights, other lights, security lights, up to almost the twilight levels and as you see here sky glow can be even higher than the light that’s produced by the full moon. And here you see now the different melatonin suppression levels that we found in the literature. So for this, we searched for studies working on melatonin and light pollution, and found around 1700 studies, but only 75 of them were really light pollution studies, it means they’re doing the experiments, exposed to animals to bright light levels, daylight like levels, during the day and low light levels during the night. And what we found is an extremely high sensitivity of some fish species which started suppressing melatonin production, the night hormone production, at values of 0.01 lux which is enormously dark, it’s an extremely dark value, it’s almost going into these lower sky glow values that have been documented at different places.

For birds, it might be interesting 09:19 - for you, is the lowest threshold that we found, reliable for us all, the 0.3 lux, it’s kind of similar to the light of the maximum full moon, but we haven’t, we’re not able to find for instance, studies with petrels or other seabirds for this studies. Rodents seemed to be quite vulnerable as well, with also sky local levels that are able to suppress melatonin production, and in ungulates it’s 2.3 lux. For humans we found the lowest values, for very sensitive humans, at 6 lux, this is the number for really almost monochromatic blue light, and because melanopsin, this special circadian photoreceptor, is very sensitive to blue light it’s clear that such a low amount of light will produce a suppression of melatonin production. The interesting thing now for these studies is that we found, with increasing number of studies, lower thresholds, and this may have several reasons, the methods are becoming better to test this and people started to test these low light levels only a few years ago.

10:42 - We have to expect that for other groups there will be also lower light levels found soon Humans are near the exception again here, the 6 lux reported for humans since it’s more this monochrome, exceptional monochromatic light, but of course with humans it’s more difficult to run, for instance, lab experiments due to ethical reasons of course. I would like to continue now with insects, now focusing more on behavioral aspects. Insects, half of the insects, are nocturnal and similar to the vertebrates they also adapted to this nocturnal niche by developing low light sensors, and these low light sensors can become easily stressed by such a street light, for instance, because they are not prepared to perceive such differences in light levels. Some insects are blind for more than one hour until they are able to use the visual information around, from the environment. Within this one hour they are blind to the environment, some other insects, they have no chance, they are completely disoriented, exhausted after a while, and many insects show a clear positive phototaxis.

12:11 - And we are talking now, in ecology also, about a vacuum cleaner effect, because these vacuum cleaners attract insects from habitats nearby and many of these insects have no chance to go back to their habitats or to travel to other habitats. There are some profiters, some bat species are taking an advantage of this new situations, but we know also, well maybe everybody knows, and has seen these high amount of spiders near streetlights, and in normal natural conditions you would never find them in such a high density. And these predators are taking advantage of this high numbers of disorientated insects, like a buffet, it’s a very easy prey for them. To investigate how these is impacting insects in the ecosystem context we run since 2012 an experimental field site, we have different field sites like this one, a kind of matrix of street lights in a distance of 20 meters from each other, we have several rows of lights, and we installed flight interception traps, pitfall traps, and emergence traps to catch for instance insects that are aquatic, insects that have aquatic larval stage and then emerge as an adult flying insect. And what we found was, that the emergence, the production of insects coming out of the water system is increasing during the summer, due to artificial light, due to street lights near the water surface.

14:07 - We also see that vacuum cleaner effect, aquatic insects are, in a higher number now attracted to streetlights near the shoreline and it’s a kind of an ecological trap, especially for these aquatic insects because many of them will have no chance to go back to these systems, to lay eggs or to do other activities. And what you also see then, as a result that there’s an increase of the flux of aquatic insects into the terrestrial system, the increase of aquatics insects but also of organic matter so to say. And what we also see is that there’s a cascade effect on terrestrial predators, there are many predators on the ground, bottom dwelled predators, that are able to take advantage of these new situations, harvestmen, beetles, spiders and the dietary composition of these predators is significantly affected. So artificial light at night is not only a nocturnal attractive or repulsive stimulus, it also affects aquatic-terrestrial food web interactions. The same system, we also investigated how microbial communities are impacted, we investigated here for instance sediment microbial communities during the night, which are important food source for insects, for many insect larvae living in these aquatic systems.

and normally under natural conditions, 15:47 - there’s no photosynthesis during the night so the net ecosystem production is almost zero, but the community respiration of these microorganisms, like microbial communities, is quite high. So net ecosystem production is normally lower than the community respiration. After we have illuminated the whole system for more than one year, it took quite a while, it was not an immediate effect, then we saw that between summer and winter communities which were, under natural conditions significantly different from each other, were no longer, or we were no longer able to disentangle them, there’s no clear, so the temple structure more or less is kind of impacted by light at night, and we put some of these samples into the left, returns them to the left and expose them to strong street lights, 70 lux, but the surprising thing was that now some of these microbial communities were able to run photosynthesis, and the net ecosystem production and some of these sediment samples were bigger than the community respiration, and this means photosynthesis during the night, that has never happened before during the evolution on Earth. This is a really new ecosystem, ecosystem situation induced by light at night, and of course in this case it is a kind of a nocturnal thing, but it has to be tested to see if this also takes place in other ecosystems as well. If you now position these vacuum cleaners or street lights in a row, which is a normal situation for a typical street in the city for instance, then this can result in a migration barrier because many of these insects are still attracted to the lights and waste a lot of time and energy to pass these barriers.

We also investigated this effect, the migration, the barrier 18:17 - effect in our field site, this is an aerial photo, and we tested the hypothesis: if there would be no effect of light pollution on the samples of flying insects, then these samples should be always the same. But this was not the case, over several years we found that the central traps collected less insects compared to the corner traps and the wing traps in this light field. Based on this we calculated an attraction radius, for moths for instance, which was about 23 meters, 23 meters sounds not so big, huge, but if you consider for instance the situation of an urban area like here in Berlin, where you find a net of illuminated light corridors, and if you consider that the distance between lampposts in Europe is normally between 25 and 45 meter, you can imagine that these kind of net, of light corridors, can act as a barrier to moths movement because the attraction radius of 23 meters can in many cases overlap. And migratory species lose, and can lose, valuable time and energy to reach a destination to reproduce successfully. This is not only the case for insects, or for moth in this case, it has been reported for fish, for bats and I guess also for birds, this might be the case.

19:59 - Insect decline, maybe you payed also attention to these articles, that were published in 2017, and here based on a long-term series, of 27 years, the authors found that more than a 75% decline in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. And this was covered by science, and there was another German publication about a different data set, but also long-term data set, which was reporting a similar effect: arhtropod decline in grasslands and forests in this case, and both these studies stipulated that besides pesticides, fragmentation, land-use change, there must be another landscape level driver which could be important for this arthropod insects decline. That was the reason for us to check where the sampling locations were during this clever studio, for the first one, and in most cases, these sites were highly light polluted as you can see here. And there are some other long-term data sets that have shown that light explains changes in abundance, in the Netherlands for instance, nocturnal phototactic moths show a stronger decline compared to the diurnal, so there are also diurnal moths, and non-phototactic species. And in the UK and Ireland there was a long-term study where light pollution explains 20% of the long-term changes in moth abundance.

21:56 - So if you think about the insect decline, you have to think always about the insect decline in context matters, because you have many insects that are associated to plants, to crops, to many different predators and they fulfill important ecosystem functions, for instance, pollination and remineralization of dead organic material. And we checked the literature and reviewed the literature, and found that many of these associated species like crop and trees, pest species and their natural enemies, nocturnal pollinators and the ground-dwelling arthropod communities, are impacted. In one example for instance, three years ago I think, Knop lab published a paper, in Nature I think, about the impact of artificial light on pollination. And they found that artificial light has a significant impact on the pollination efficiency of nocturnal pollinators. So not only the diurnal pollinators are important for ecosystems, such as bees, but also flies, moths and beetles are very important and these pollination function was significantly decreased, and also the fruit output of these plants was negatively impacted by artificial light, by just installing a streetlight nearby.

23:36 - In this conference we will hear a lot about mortality of seabirds and that has been already described in several publications, also for this area here where your main focus is, and it has also been shown that it is not only light pollution, which is a threat for petrels, there are many other factors that have to be considered, although light projection seems to be a really important one. Maybe I would like to point your attention then to an action program that was developed in Germany for insects protection, to protect insects and their biodiversity based on the evidence that both light pollution and other factors have to be considered when it comes to define comprehensive packages of measures. And this is a mixture, and that might be also a good stimulus for your own projects. So for instance, in Germany the binding statutory requirements are under an insect protection act are now developed, it’s in the process, and so it will be also manifested in a legal basis. Money will go to insect protection and insect research.

25:10 - The protection and restoration of insect habitats in all areas of the landscape should be supported. Clear guidance and sustainable application of pesticides and other harmful substances, because of course agriculture will continue to use these substances but there might be ways to make it more sustainable. And one important point in this action program for insect conservation is mitigation of light pollution and insect attraction to light and we are happy to that, the government is considering this aspect because we see that there is enough evidence to become active here. And of course the last point, and you are following this course already as well, the promotion and support of civic commitment for the benefit of insects in all areas of society. How to use artificial light in a sustainable way? It’s not so difficult I have to say, there are some rules that you have to follow and that kind of reach a lot, but this has to be more accepted by politicians of course, and the general public.

26:19 - Direct light, where and when is needed, one really important rule that everybody can follow, not only in public, but also in private areas. So these kind of street lights should no longer be used, they should be shielded lights, where only this area, where light is needed, is illuminated and only during the time when it is needed. Customized color spectre, we know already that humans and insects, many insects, are very vulnerable to blue light and UV light, to short wavelengths, and if you know that humans or insects or other sensitive organisms have to be protected then it is possible to customize the color spectra, concerning the relevant organisms in their environment. And a very important point: light levels as low as possible. This is something that has to be figured out with very different disciplines, of course people coming from the safety area, urban and land planners, architects, lighting designers and many other disciplines.

And by following this rule you can use light 27:41 - in a more sustainable way, this is for instance, maybe, this might be a camping ground on the Canary Islands and if you imagine to follow all these rules, if these rules are implemented, then of course it could be possible to use light in a more sustainable way, with less negative effects on the environment, but still humans would be able to use light for orientation, safety and security. And the advantage is of course that you can experience the natural night sky like this one, a very beautiful picture of the Milky Way. And with this picture I would like to thank the audience, for your attention and I would like to thank all the different institutes that supported our projects for more than 10 years now. Thanks a lot. Thanks Franz for your nice presentation, a wonderful presentation, I have enjoyed it and I’m glad to see that the German government wants to mitigate light pollution impact on insects through this conservation, insect conservation program, sorry, and this is a really good decision. I wanted to ask you about that. Is there any law in the German country to protect their insects? Or their invertebrates of light pollution? Not really, in one publication we, together with the experts of environmental law, we analyzed the situation and so far it is not so good…

29:48 - So the environmental laws do not really consider light pollution, it’s a quite new stressor and the legislative situation is not really prepared for that, but it’s on it’s way through this conservation act that is developing at the moment. So people think about how this can be considered, it’s something that we have to expect in the future. Would be nice to see what is the outcome of this law. You also talked about the vacuum cleaner effect, what do you think about the similarities between birds and for example insects? Can this vacuum cleaner effect happen to birds? To, for example, migratory birds or seabirds? Yeas, I think so, this is an interesting question that should, and can be analyzed in this way. During bird migration, it has been reported that lightbeams or other light structures are attracting birds, especially when it is cloudy and it seems that they’re very vulnerable, and also in your case, grounding of flashings is a kind of vacuum cleaner-like attraction, of birds to these light sources.

Yes, because 31:25 - I have been thinking about that, for a long time, but I don’t know if it’s really a vacuum cleaner effect, a variation in migration, or a combination of both, because in the case of seabird is something… They try to go from land to the ocean and then we could say that it’s a barrier, if not to the migration at least to the movement. Yeah. Obviously it’s also a vacuum cleaner effect. But of course it’s increasing the landscape resistance so it takes them more time and energy to pass these illuminated areas, which is also important I guess for many bird species, to save energy which is needed, especially for these highly migratory birds, they have to migrate long distances and if there are many kinds of disturbances or barriers then of course they waste a lot of energy, that in the end may be needed for successful reproduction for instance, and of course time synchronization so that sexual partners meet at the same time at a certain point which is a very important aspect in ecology for many organisms, and this is also kind of landscape resistance aspect that has to be considered, because the synchronization is no longer guaranteed when birds pass through highly polluted areas. Okay. Thank you very much Franz, thank you for your presentation.

I want to remind our audience 33:14 - that we have the chat, you can write your questions if you want, on the chat. Now we will have our next speaker, who is Theresa Jones from Melbourne uni. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Theresa is the last speaker of the day and I am going to welcome her in English because she’s from England and that way she can understand me. Hello Theresa, how are you? Hi Airam, how are you? How are you doing with the pandemic? Oh yeah we’re getting through, it it’s getting better, so it’s good for us now. Good. Theresa is a Behavioral Ecologist with a particular focus on understanding the mating system, the role of the chemical cues and most recently, the impact of artificial lighting on individual fitness and community structure.

00:46 - She completed her undergraduate at Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine, in the United Kingdom, and her PhD at the Institute of Zoology. Since 2001 she has conducted research at the University of Melbourne, and currently she’s a senior lecturer at that university, in the School of Bioscience. She is the principal investigator of the Urban Light Lab, sorry, the Urban Light Lab is a very recent laboratory which is publishing very interesting papers on this topic and today she will talk about how artificial light impacts on individual fitness and community structure. Theresa. I’m good to go, thank you, I’ll just share my screen and sound, hopefully everything work. Thank you so much for this opportunity, it’s fantastic to be presenting in the Canary Islands even if i’m not there, i’m in Melbourne where the sun is setting at at the moment.

So somewhat, 01:55 - what i’m going to talk about has already been uncovered before, but i’ll go through it very quickly just to make sure that we’re all on board. As you’ve already heard, light is a constancy experienced by life on earth and light is integral to so many processes, it’s integral to our seasons, the spring, summer, autumn and winter is driven by changes in light levels. It also changes our hormones, changes our hormones in spring many new offspring are born, and it can also be linked to changes in the color of skin and fur. But it’s not just annual changes, light is also integral to circadian rhythm. Circadian is circa-diem, “about the day”, light determines when we go to sleep and when we wake for all of these different animals.

For us, we wake in the in the day and we go to sleep at night, but 02:45 - many species are asleep during the nighttime and awake in the day. And these nocturnal species are quite plentiful on the planet, they’re more than 28% of vertebrates and 63% of invertebrates are nocturnal. And in that night also varies, so the darkness is not the same darkness over every single night, we have a lunar cycle, a moon cycle, and that can change the foraging behavior, it determines when some animals will go outside, it determines one of the largest mass spawning events on the planet, coral reef spawning, and it also can determine when some animals want to sing or not. This is a willy wagtail, it’s a species we have here in Australia, this, hopefully you’ll be able to hear it, oh! no you can’t. What you can hear there is a willy wagtail calling and another one calling back, and you’ll notice it’s very quiet and that’s because a recent student of mine Ashton Dickerson has found out that the willy wagtail is a prolific nocturnal singer, so it sings at night and the amount of singing varies over the lunar cycle, so it likes to sing on a really big bright moon, it’s a very visual species so it likes to sing and be unseen, so light also controls the communication, and it controls the behavior.

But light doesn’t 04:18 - always, it’s just not the intensity of light, but also the color of light that’s important and that’s been important for four billion years, and if we think about when life first evolved on the planet it evolved not like the willy wagtail, in a tree or on the on terra firma, it actually evolved in the ocean and if we look at how light passes through, and I know you will have heard some of this already, we can see that light passes through differently and in fact blue light passes really far down through the ocean, and so before it provides one of the best representations of when it’s day, when there’s lots of blue, and when it’s night and this is the color of light that life on earth uses as one of the primary signals of biology, and in fact our own visual system and our non-visual signal system is based on this color of light in particular so our visual signal, I’m not going to show many graphs, but here’s one the “V” is what we can see, humans can see between about 400 and 700 nanometers. We also have another system though, called the circadian system, and this is a non-visual photoreceptor, and this peeks, around blue and this circadian system is partly driving our day night rhythm, and in fact this blue peak is very ancient and we can find it not only in humans, we can find it if you look down here in all of these different bacteria, and these green cyanobacteria were the precursors to plants, and it’s also present in plants. In fact many of you may turn your phones, my phone is doing this right now because the sun is setting, my phone turns into the red at night, the blue is being shifted away. The reason for this is not just because it’s making me sleep, the reason is because four billion years ago blue light was an important trigger for life in the oceans, to distinguish between day, when it was very blue, and night when the blue was reduced. The light itself is not the thing that drives the biological rhythm, it’s changing our biological rhythm but it also relies on chemicals and neurons in our body, and one of the key chemicals that life on earth uses is melatonin.

Melatonin is present across much of life, 06:33 - a really important ancient chemical and it has a rhythm to its production, you can see here this wiggly line represents the melatonin concentrations in my body, and indeed yours. So at night time melatonin is peaking but melatonin is sensitive to light, so in daytime my melatonin concentrations are dropping, they rise again at night and they drop in the day. And melatonin is one of the chemicals involved in driving our circadian rhythm, and this is what it’s best known for, as a biological indicator or time keeper. And many of you, if you travel across to a different time zone, if I were indeed to fly to you, only I could, my body would be out of sync, and one of the chemicals that’s out of sync is melatonin, it takes a while for that to catch up and some of you may take melatonin to help you re-sync your body. Now whether that actually works it’s probably a subject for another talk, but it’s a really good segue into the second and lesser known function of melatonin, which is as an antioxidant.

So an antioxidant mops 07:42 - up potentially dangerous free radicals that are floating around our body, they’re natural byproducts and metabolism but they need to be soaked up by these antioxidants. So, for four billion years, for life on earth, melatonin acted as a driver of biological rhythm and also as an antioxidant, a protector of the cells of life. But melatonin is sensitive to light and it’s also sensitive to light at night, artificial light, so in the presence of artificial light at night melatonin concentrations decline. And so that protector of the cells of life, the driver of biological rhythm, is compromised and it’s compromised globally. This, as all of you will know by now, is a composite image of light at night across the globe and in fact, up to 20% of land mass is covered by light at night.

The top photo there 08:40 - there is Melbourne it’s where I live, that’s our city center and it’s not so different to many city centres around the world. On the right hand side you can see a sports ground, this is where my sons play football and cricket, you can see the big bright light shining in the foreground, and you can see the full moon rising in the background. So given the importance that light for light for life on the planet, we can only start to imagine how important it’s going to be when we start changing those cycles. And this is where light pollution comes in, so I’m going to give you a potted history of some of the work that is going on in my lab. I’m not suggesting it’s the most important but it’s some of the work I know best so I’ll give you just a little bit of insight into where we’ve been looking, at the individual, and as I said, the community level impacts.

09:30 - We contributed to a recent Jez-A journal issue, and on this front cover you can see all of the potential impacts of light at night, you can see that light at night the light that’s shining down is masking the light cycle, it’s no longer dark, in fact we can see color, we can see like daylight, it’s changing behavior that willy wagtail that I showed you before, is now chasing after a moth that’s flying up to the night, it’s disrupting the sleep of both of these species, and what you can’t see, and something we think is much more insidious, is it’s also potentially disrupting physiology. So I’ll go through some of these things in detail and exemplar, and show some examples from some of the work in my lab, I should say most of this work is from my students and I will try and acknowledge them as we move through. So light at night masks sunrise and sunset, it’s not daytime but it certainly masks that period of night, the willy wagtail that I showed you earlier in these cricket species, here’s one, here this is the mole cricket. And this is a field cricket, this is my model species of choice, has got quite a beautiful sound. What we know about that from studies that we’ve done across the landscape in Victoria, is that in urban environments their communication shifts compared to the rural natural environment that they live in.

So we’re changing their 11:01 - behavior it’s masking the time when they would normally start communicating and it’s disrupting the length of time that they communicate for. So it’s changing an aspect, a really important aspect of their behavior and light at night we know shifts behavior. It affects foraging and movement patterns, let’s not get me wrong about this, light is put there because it changes my behavior, when the light is put there myself and my sons can go play footy, or we can go and kick a, you know, a ball around. But it also affects the foraging and movement patterns of other animals, the turtles are a classic example, instead of moving towards the horizon if lights are on the beaches they move inland, some bat species are completely terrified of the light, I say that’s quite anthropomorphic, but they move away from light environments, and one of the other things that we know is that light is disrupting physiology and I’ll talk about that in a moment. It’s changing foraging, it’s changing metabolism and it’s now been linked to increased levels of obesity.

12:05 - So light can attract we’ve known that, Aristotle’s known that, he’s talked about a moth to a flame, but what if it’s tens or hundreds of moths to a flame and what if it’s thousands whole communities, then what. What we’re doing here is disrupting not just the individual’s behavior but also the behavior of a whole community. But one of the things about biology is, often where there’s a negative there’s a positive, there’s a yin and a yang and all of these species potentially benefit because the insects are attracted to lights, so spiders, geckos and bats, if they don’t mind the light can feed upon these insects rather like an invertebrate sushi train, this spider you can see here is a nocturnal garden spider, we don’t have a torch on it, it literally is building its web underneath a bright street light and my student Nick Willmott, who’s shown there in the top, did lots of experiments for his masters and what he showed is that they actually preferentially go towards the light and build their webs under these street lamps, and the reason for that is that these webs then attract lots and lots of insects so they gain a resource by feeding, now what I’ll also show you later is that physiologically they are compromised. Now the species that I’ve just shown you are mostly nocturnal, so they’re usually active at night, so light at night is not necessarily disrupting them to the same degree although we know that it is increasingly doing this. But what about those species that are usually day active? Light at night is changing our night, it’s making it brighter and we know that this affects sleep, it affects sleep in myself and my children, it keeps us awake at night particularly blue light is really important, now this is a study that’s not my own but it’s certainly one that’s really interesting because it shows that the effect that light at night has isn’t always the same for all individuals, and in fact in humans we know that light at night is way more detrimental to adult and children than it is to adults.

14:14 - In this study what they did was, they exposed adults and children to two different colors of light, a very bright blue white light, a 6000 K, and a dimmer almost orangey light 3000 K. And then they tested sleepiness at bedtime, which is BT and one hour past bedtime, and you can see in adults that the presence of light at night affected their sleepiness, they weren’t as sleepy, but they did tend to get more sleepy as they went past their bedtime. And that was roughly the same for both colors of light. But for children, again they were affected by both colors of light at bedtime, if they’re exposed to a yellowy light, though, they did tend to feel quite a lot more sleepy a bit later. But if they were exposed to the blue white light that you can see here, they actually still didn’t feel sleepy.

So it’s having a massive impact and so that’s within individuals 15:08 - in a species, all our research is also showing is it’s not just within individuals and species, it’s actually different for different species. Some work that my now Dr. Anne Aulsebrook did for her PhD looked at the impact of light at night on sleep in avian species. In her work on the urban black swan, she used loggers to actually measure sleep, and what we found was that in the presence of light at night swan’s sleep was disrupted and they were way more active, and we literally did this by translocating swans into a parkland that was quite dark and we put a street light, this one here, this is a real street light we just put it onto a pole and we either shined whiter or, and the light, regardless of the color light the swans were disrupted. So rather unusually taking away that blue light still had a massive impact on swan sleep behavior. So Anne then repeated this in the lab, using pigeons so she did it here, I found exactly the same thing, even taking away the blue light rather surprisingly to us melatonin concentrations seem to still be affected, but more importantly, sleep was still massively impacted.

16:24 - We then did another study where we actually looked to see whether it was the fact that we put light there all night or whether it was a color of light that was important, because one of the things you do when you shine a light, is you make it brighter, you make it more visual, and it may be that birds are more active because they’re scared of predators, on the other hand it may be because it’s being affecting their melatonin. So to test this we did another experiment with Farley Connelly here in magpies, and we did the same experiment only this time we shut the light off after four hours and we looked to see what happened Now, interestingly in the magpies they were way more sensitive to blue light than amberlight, so amber light was a slight mitigation strategy for them but they also recovered really rapidly suggesting that maybe it wasn’t just the physiology but also the fact that we changed their visual environment that had an impact. But that physiology is something that we didn’t do as much in this particular group but we certainly did in other species, so we looked specifically at light at night disrupting physiological process. And we go back to that melatonin. Melatonin is driving circadian rhythm but it also acts as an antioxidant and that has capacity to affect massively physiological process. If we look across a range of different species what we can see is that melatonin is, light at night, sorry, is associated with lower levels of melatonin.

So most of the 17:55 - species, except for the cricket are ones I haven’t worked on, but they’ve all demonstrated that in the presence of light at night melatonin concentrations drop as we saw in that graph. I did an experiment in the cricket Teleogryllus Commodus that I just played you, the same thing happened there, in the presence of light at night melatonin concentrations lower. This then means that the protector of the cells of life and driver of circadian rhythm, is compromised. And what we found accordingly is that light at night affects some of our key life history traits, things like growth, reproduction and survival, again it affects in all of these vertebrate species, I’ve not worked on these in my lab, but there’s some really good evidence and that evidence is increasing, but it’s also been shown in invertebrate species, these spiders and insects that you see down here. The spider that I showed you earlier, that one that benefited from all of those insects being caught in its web, when we took away that benefit, when we gave spiders that were reared under lights, or no lights, the same food, so we took that benefit away, what we found is that the spiders under no lights were much bigger than spiders reared under lights but more importantly they laid almost 70% more offspring.

19:16 - These are tiny little spiders eggs, so poor Nick analyzed about 140 000 eggs during his masters project. So this is demonstrating that urban spiders, even though, they’re benefiting actually there is still a potential physiological cost that we can’t see because of the benefits of those insects that they attract. Now interestingly, in spiders the number of offspring or babies that you have is directly linked to your size, now that’s not the case for all species, and in the cricket species that I work on, and was worked on by my master student Joanna Durrant and an honors student Michael Botha, in this species we also found a shift in development time and also development with respect to light at night but it actually increased juvenile development. So light had the opposite effect. So again we’re seeing differences across species. It changed development by about approximately 10 days, now that doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s about 15% of their lifestyle cycle, and that might mean that they have less generations in any given year. What was also important about this experiment is it showed us a relatively low levels of light, 1 lux, which is really tiny, these impacts were already being felt.

20:36 - And finally my student Lucy also did experiments in Drosophila melanogaster and she confirmed, you don’t necessarily need to know the details in this, but again exposing to different levels of light we found impacts on fecundity, so the total number of offspring went down in the presence of light, and also adult survival changed. So all of these traits are changing in the presence of light at night, suggesting that urban species may be impacted. One of the things we’re increasingly realizing has realized in the medical field for actually quite a number of decades, is that light can potentially affect health. The top species here are the animal species that we know in the presence of light at night have compromised or at least altered immune systems. The world health organization and american medical association have both declared night shift work in the presence of light at night to be potentially carcinogenic and blue light in particular is something we need to consider and is of importance in driving some of these patterns that we see.

Most recently, or at least over 21:46 - the last decade, light pollution has been implicated in global biodiversity declines, so reductions in vertebrates and invertebrates. You all probably have already heard a number of instances where this has been exemplified or shown, some recent evidence suggests that even pollinators, those really important species that are pollinating our flowers are declining also. Our data is also suggesting that in the presence of light at night, so under normal street escapes, the number of invertebrates and the composition of those communities is also changing. Martin Lockett he did a massive experiment replicating one that Jonathan Davies did, a number of years ago, here we found something slightly different but we’re still finding a direct impact of light at night on the communities of invertebrates that are trapped under lights at night. So in night samples the communities and the number of invertebrates captured are reduced compared to samples that are taken between lights, under lights.

22:57 - One of the things that I’m most interested in at the moment is looking at whether light at night is driving not just changes that we can see but also whether it may be changing some of the genetics, driving evolutionary change, maybe driving new species or changing the genetics of particular species and that’s something that is gradually becoming more and more important and certainly something that’s been worked on in the field of ecology or urban ecology for a while. So we face a problematic future, on the one hand, humans love light and we know that some species like these urban foxes will do really well, the problem is that as humans we love light and we’re quite a visual species, and so to take it away is really problematic for us because we perceive it as safety. It’s also becoming as you’ve already heard, we’re seeing a global shift to LED light technology or streets streetscapes, so LED lights have a change in the color and they shift from this orange lighting that you see here, to the blue light that you see in this spectrogram here, so this is revealing the different colors of light that are being emitted from the LED light. And it’s not going to go unnoticed to see that that’s coinciding perfectly with our own circadian and indeed visual spectrum. So what we hope is for a not so bright future, there are different technologies that are now being employed, different ways in which we can mitigate some of the impacts of light at night.

Ultimately when Edison first turned 24:33 - on the light, this is what each room and each electric light was equipped with. “This room is equipped with Edison electric lights. Do not attempt to light with match. Simply turn key on wall by the door”, which is why we turn on the light by the way. Importantly Edison felt that electricity for lighting was in no way harmful to health more indeed does it affect the soundness of sleep. Hopefully I’ve shown you that that’s probably not the case and we may need to rethink this.

Edison also thought there was really no reason why 25:03 - men should go to bed at all, so maybe he wouldn’t care even if he knew this, but for me, I also take the women should go to bed and I’m quite happy to do so, and to do so, what we need to do is turn off those lights because it’s all important that we put ourselves under our natural light environment, not the one that the 21st century has provided. So with that I’d just like to thank my amazing lab, I live vicariously through the work that they do, here’s a suite of all my students that have contributed to some of the work that I talked about today, and also to the funding bodies, the Australian Government, The Hermon Slade Foundation, the Holsworth Wildlife foundation, and also Birdlife Australia, thank you. Thank you Theresa, thank you for this nice presentation. I’m sorry about the background. Don’t worry, it’s fine, thank you. Hopefully you can get rid of it. This has been a very illustrative presentation by Theresa and I would like to make one little question, or major, what do you think about how light pollution will drive the evolution? How light is going… I don’t know, I mean, I think one of the things it might do is, it might depend on where those species are, so some species are going to be quite adaptive, plastic, in their response so they’re going to be okay, those might be the species that are already really happy in a rural environment and really happy, well “happy”, in an urban environment, already found there.

But whether it then changes, if we’re seeing changes to 26:47 - when animals are communicating or maybe even the types of songs that they’re using to communicate, then it might be that in our cities we start seeing a pulling away of that communication for example, from a rural species, and it might not make much of a difference at the border, there may be enough overlap, but in the city they might suddenly start getting new populations that are quite different, and so we may see speciation based on communication. I was thinking, during your presentation about your studies on on the spider, you saw that the spider used the light to build the webs for the instects that are attracted to the light, but then you saw also that the spider left, well, they are smaller in size and they they also laid less number of eggs.Yeah. It seemed clearly, an ecological trap. It was? Sorry. Is that an ecological trap? Yeah, maybe. Well I think actually what’s happening is that it’s not because they’re still getting… because they’re getting lots more food, it’s overcoming the ecological trap, so it’s a weird ecological trap, yeah. But actually what’s happening, I forgot to say, is that they are they are only passing through about two-thirds of their moults.

28:35 - So spiders molt their skin, as they get bigger and the ones under light grow more fast and have less moults, but they’re actually changing their development under light if we keep food constant. So under that scenario it’s changing physiology. Okay, but my question was, if we follow this example, this modern species, the spider. Yeah. Could we make a similarity, a similar change? I mean the humans, for example we worked at night, we changed our behavior, our activities, from diurnal to nocturnal… the same that is happening to the spider can be also happening to us. Yeah, that’s a really good point.

I mean, I think it’s possible that we can, you know people still take melatonin 29:42 - and they take things, if you feed yourself properly, I guess, you can overcome some of those. The thing about sleep deprivation, though, is we know it’s really bad. So if you’re changing your sleep it’s almost like being drunk you know, one sleep deprived night is like being in Australia 0.05, which is over the limit for drinking. So, now whether we can overcome that? I don’t know, I think some of the things we can, I think that loss of sleep is possibly one of the… is probably going to be one of the most problematic things as we move through the 21st century.

30:27 - Okay, thank you very much, Theresa for your presentation and also thanks for your answer to my question. I would like to remind that the chat is open, you can write your question if you want to discuss, use it, and now i’m going to. Theresa is the last presenter of the day and tomorrow we will have more presentations. And now I will talk a little bit in spanish Theresa is the last lecturer of the day and tomorrow we’ll have more lecturers, with more topics over light pollution and light. Remember that the chat is open, and you are able to write any question, if you have any for Theresa or for us. And thanks again, see you tomorrow. Good bye .