Slashdot Mirror
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".
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.
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.
As opposed to the wacko conservatives who think we should keep destroying the environment including all of our food until we're all dead. Don't you just love exaggerated strawmen blanket statements? It's much easier than thinking.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Anytime anything anywhere makes any sound or any motion my cat is scared out of her mind. That's just what animals do.
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.
There's a little bit more to it than that. UV is in virtually all normal light sources as well, it's the duration and intensity that are harmful. The reason animals are bothered would seem to be that there is a flashing light of a particular color in the otherwise dark night. You are probably at roughly equal risk if you frequent establishments that use blacklights.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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...
At first glance, I read that as "you and your elk"
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?...
Us right wing troglodytes want those caves all to ourselves. You left wingers can live up on the surface. Until we sound the sirens for lunchtime.
Have gnu, will travel.
Its probably a matter of acclimatization. Deer that live near roadways get used to traffic (and get run over from time to time). Likewise, crows that aren't used to cars fly off as they approach while the ones that hang around roads just hop over to the fog line until they pass.
The problem would be the effect on migrating herds. Animals that live around power lines get used to them. But an elk herd from some distance away might take some time getting used to them before crossing under.
Have gnu, will travel.
Transformers aren't connected* to really high voltage lines. The kind that generate serious levels of corona.
*Not the ones hanging on a pole. HV transformers typically sit in large switchyards.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
>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.
Compare your sentence to the following to work out why it's bullshit. And if you can't work out why it's bullshit, please take a beginner's science course:
"There's acid in our stomachs! We're all going to dissolve away!".
or
"There's nitrogen in the air! You could suffocate!"
The question is not WHAT it is - it's UV light - it's how much it is. We're SWATHED in UV light right now. No matter where you are, unless possibly you are miles underground and have turned all the lights off (but, to be honest, by then there are much more serious risks to your health).
How much UV is it giving off? What energies? For how long? Focused where (inverse-square law springs to mind, having recently used it to explain similar crap about mobile phone towers)? How long are people sitting under it and how close?
And, to be honest, nobody really WANTS to live under a giant sparking wire, but simple economics and land-use dictate that in some countries some people have to. The threat of the thing falling on your house / some kid climbing up the tower is a million times more dangerous than anything to do with a form of EM radiation it's given off, no matter what the frequency.
For every unit of UV this thing is giving off to someone living hundreds of metres away behind a brick wall, I bet there's two units coming out of their house wiring / lighting / fish tank / other sources RIGHT NEXT TO THEIR HEADS.
There are high voltage transformers as well, but it takes larger critters than squirrels to short them out. Maybe a raccoon can, but more likely it has to be human sized.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Not really. UV vision is pretty common among insects & birds. Additionally, it's pretty common in lizards and fish that live close to the surface. And don't get us started on the ridiculously overengineered eyes of the mantis shrimp.
Among mammals, it's common in nocturnal species like mice & bats, and we've started to notice it in reindeer and have theorized that it might be common in snow-adapted species.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Just another excuse for wacko liberals to demand we abandon civilization and go back to our caves.
Because, of course, there couldn't possibly be a technological solution to this. It's only "do it cheap" or "I hate America."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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
"There's acid in our stomachs! We're all going to dissolve away!".
"Acid in your stomach is OK, so stop complaining about the acid I'm putting in your eye.
Learn to love Alaska
Which acid? How much? Where? In what concentration?
You can miss the point all you want. What matters is NOT the substance, or the nature of the substance, as much as the concentration and the effects at that concentration.
Acid in your eye? Try fusidic acid.
During the 80's I worked at a large nylon factory (1200 employees), they had two large HV transformers side by side under a chicken wire cage to keep humans and animals out. Somehow a possum (about the size of a racoon) found itself on the inside of the cage and was electrocuted, the shock threw it from one transformer to the other shorting out both. Damage bill was $50K plus a couple of days lost production.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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
Yup, and as a non-electrical worker, the number one reason I hear for outages is incursions by animals. So they aren't bothered by the large transformers at the really high voltages either.
Learn to love Alaska
One near me was taken out by a snake. The snake liked the heat, stretched out, and took out the substation. I've also heard of them being taken out by rodents (larger ones), but that included some chewing action, not just a short.
Learn to love Alaska
two large HV transformers side by side under a chicken wire cage
That would be what we in the utility biz call "medium voltage". You don't really start to see corona until you get into the 60 kV and up range. That's "high voltage".
Keep in mind that any animal like a bird that approaches a high voltage line (within a few inches) will experience the same E-fields that cause the corona on the conductor. This discharge is a local ionization at an object's surface and would feel like something between an itching sensation and a continuous static discharge (painful).
Birds don't sit on HV lines.
Have gnu, will travel.
Bastard loves the power cables of my PC !!!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
"The Word of the RNG." The world is not black and white. It's not even 16 color. UV is part of the spectrum.