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Power Cables' UV Flashes Apparently Frighten Animals
Rambo Tribble writes "Ultraviolet light flashes, or "corona", may be scaring animals and altering behavior. An international scientific team, first studying behavioral anomalies in reindeer near power lines, have found that sporadic flashes of UV from the lines are probably responsible. As most mammals can see into the UV spectrum, this has broad implications for the disruption of animal behavior. From the BBC article: "Since, as the researchers added, coronas 'happen on all power lines everywhere,' the avoidance of the flashes could be having a global impact on wildlife.""
After reading the article this may prove to be a solution to the numerous deer car collisions. I might try this given the number of deer in my area.
Time to offend someone
Does everything humans do that affects animal behavior need to be altered or fixed? In this case the "impact" is simply that the animals stay away from the power lines. There are countless naturally-occurring things in nature that have similar kinds of "impact".
I thought chickens and bees were special in the animal kingdom for UV vision.
If high voltage power lines are emitting serious bursts of UV that lends some credence to people not wanting to live directly under them, doesn't it.
Well, of course reindeer are especially scared of power lines. They're a hazard for most low-flying objects.
Troll Hunter really was a documentary.
Just another excuse for wacko liberals to demand we abandon civilization and go back to our caves.
All of course except for the wacko liberals who get Lear jets and free fuel to go around telling us all that we should go back to our caves.
Ban warp drive travel? Crazy eurotrash!
People don't live in tanning beds under power lines, so it doesn't lend much credence at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was wondering whether there UV flash also exist for DC transmission lines. Is there any expert around who knows that?
This is of interest as it is very difficult to build new power lines all over Europe, usually resulting in around 20 years of legal battle for a mere 30 km of power lines far away from any densely populated area. This is just slightly reduced for buried transmission lines with all their disadvantages. Thus a current idea/discussion is to hang DC power lines on existing poles for long distance transmission.
Can most animals also see infrared light? This may not be commonly known, but we, warm blooded animals, glow. Our body heat cause the emission of photons in the infrared spectrum, this is how forward looking infrared (FLIR) cameras work. Anyways, I was just wondering if animals can see other animals glowing at night.
Anytime anything anywhere makes any sound or any motion my cat is scared out of her mind. That's just what animals do.
As Anthony David describes in his book, animals think like autistic people and are bothered by UV flashes.
Many animals can see or detect the Earth's magnetic field. I have to believe those transmission lines and arcing cause some serious anomalies in what they sense.
The "UV flash scaring animals" doesn't seem to apply to squirrels.
At least not to the "crispy critter" squirrels that short out transformers.
Apparently quite a few birds can also see UV. Knowing that, would it be possible to use a UV light system to steer birds away from windmills? It appears that bird deaths is a major problem point for the renewable energy source, so any passive way of warding birds away from them would be a good thing.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Thermal IR (the wavelengths emitted by things around body temperature) is really low-energy. It's hard to focus, and hard to detect, especially with a detector that's already in the same temperature range. Pit vipers, vampire bats and some other animals do it, but the mechanism's fundamentally different from normal vision, and doesn't provide much in the way of an actual focused image. (The pit viper's pit is sort of like a pinhole camera with a really big pinhole.)
Near-IR, the kind of thing that cheap digital security cameras can see, is higher-energy. It can be emitted thermally, but you've got to get pretty hot (hundreds of degrees) to produce significant amounts. Go a little hotter, and you can produce visible light ("red-hot", "white-hot", etc.).
Even near-IR is hard to pick up with a chemical process, though, the way retinal cells pick up visible light. I'm not aware of any animals that can see significantly further than us into the near-IR -- okay, a bit of Googling turned up one fish that can do it.
VT was in Designing Women: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
My parents owned land with a heavy duty power line going right through the middle of it. The articles claim of "animals won't go anywhere near it" is a blatant lie. I have deer stands right next to the power lines and have watched deer go back and forth under them repeatedly. I have no doubt they see something, but from my observation they are more nervous about moving out into open areas (were predators/hunters can see them easily), than any flashing lights they would see.
This is great news! The UV flashes naturally warn the reindeer so that they won't land on the power lines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I guess we can't even use wind and solar now. The presence of a power grid itself is damaging to wildlife. We can't bury the lines either because that might adversely impact moles, ants, and earthworms. Humanity has no choice now but to live without electricity.
Lightning scare children, the sky is blue, etc.. Seriously, is this news? Who didn't know this?
... people are not entirely visually oblivious to the UV spectrum; most popular laundry detergents include UV reflection enhancers that make the clothes treated with them look brighter. Hunters often employ special detergents to avoid this and its affect on game. This leads me to wonder if those who claim to have adverse reactions, such as headaches, when in proximity to power lines might not, in fact, simply be more sensitive to UV spectra, and hence, these corona events.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
>and require zero power to use
Not quite. How does the noise get generated? Air gets pushed through the whistle as the car pushes through the air. And in doing so it increases the air resistance of the car, requiring the engine to put out slightly more power to maintain a constant speed. So those whistles are fairly directly engine-powered, and probably horribly inefficient - vortices which form around the around the whistles will increase drag, and well as disrupt the laminar flow of air over the car body, increasing the required power output of the engine by far more than the small amount of sonic energy generated. An electric sound machine under the hood could probably do the same jop far more efficiently
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well when i was growing up power lines were a good place to hunt as brush is cleared every so often and deer always had to cross the transmission corridor to and from food or water sources.
Wonder if I can train my dog to tell me when the batteries in my remote are low
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
OK - animals don't like power-lines and those pesky corona things. Bury all the power lines, telco and cable lines etc. Having all that crap under ground would make a nicer view for everyone. Lessen the CME effects. Virtually eliminate the whole "tree fell and knocked out the eastern-seaboard" thing etc. Less dangerous kite-flying, no more flying things (helicopters, squirrels, parachutes and the like) getting all hung up.
There are some horses that seem to 'know' when the electric fence is unplugged.
I assumed it was by picking up on human cues. I wonder if they can see the 8kV fence create corona in some cases?
They are very sensitive to it when there is a flashover, even a long distance from them. I assumed it was sound only they were sensitive to. Perhaps the UV is pretty bright to them?
Probably prohibitively expensive, but it would be nice if, someday, all that shit was underground. It looks horrible and is susceptible to lightning strikes, airplanes, helicopters (and now drones), falling trees, hurricanes, tornadoes and terrorist sabotage. And again, it just looks horrible. We bury fiber, copper, natural gas and water lines, so why is all our electrical strung up like the crack baby of a Christmas tree and a giant spider?
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Or did they not mean any power cord... :)
01/01/01
Every country boy / girl knows about them.
You city bumpkins never heard the wires sing?
Animals will do what animals will do, regardless of anything or everything you [expletive deleted] city bumpkins try to think up to screw up every body else's lives.
Ran from a badger once in a Davenport, IA subdivision, it did not seem to be bothered by anything other than it ignored the vehicular traffic but anything with legs was a challenger to its domain.
Bastard loves the power cables of my PC !!!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
that we do not...
"The Word of the RNG." The world is not black and white. It's not even 16 color. UV is part of the spectrum.
Two-(minus)Three is a mathematical expression.
Two–(en dash)Three means a range of two to three.