Some mild science for today’s blog.
One of my core research subjects in ecology is the investigation of how light pollution by artificial light at night affects plants, and how this may affect whatever is feeding on the plant. It’s still a bit of a niche area, and there’s not too much going on in this field compared to many other fields. This makes it of course a field with plenty of open questions, and lots of room for fun.
My personal interests lie mostly with how light affects plant interactions with insects, or with soil microbes.
I’m running a little experiment at the moment to investigate some of that, and I find some interesting differences between plants of different treatments already. One picture has low levels of artificial light at night, the other doesn’t.
Can you tell the difference? Which room has light, which is the control? Why?
Let me know in the comments.
Robin Heinen 