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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Thermal emissions from body heat are a fair ways into the IR range, around 8000-15000nm. For reference, human vision peters out around 700nm. I believe it's only possible to detect that with specialized sensory organs, such as pit viper's eponymous thermal pits.
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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.
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.
... 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.