This "astronomical navigation" insect has been used for hundreds of millions of years and has become an instinct. At that time, all the light sources on the earth were either the sun, the moon or the stars, more than 400,000 kilometers away from the earth. Their light can be regarded as parallel light.
Ever since man brought light to the earth, the bad luck of insects has come. Although they have accumulated hundreds of millions of years of experience, they don't know that this "artificial light" is not parallel light. It still navigates by instinct. What's the result?
Let's take the light source at 45 degrees straight ahead as an example, and the following situations appear:
Unfortunately, it almost turned a corner of 180 degrees and thought it was sailing in a straight line! In fact, its navigation trajectory is an exponential spiral (r=eθ), and the angle between the direction of navigation and the direction of light determines the shape of the spiral. If it is 90 degrees, it is round. Usually less than 90 degrees (because the eyes are born in front, of course, to facilitate the light in front), so the closer you fly to the light source, the so-called "fire extinguishing" phenomenon finally appears. This is the same as the ancient saying that meat rot produces maggots and grass rot turns into fireflies, because the observation of natural phenomena is not detailed enough and the research methods are not accurate enough.
It seems that we can learn something from this. After the environment changes, the original methods need to be revised and supplemented, and we can't blindly rely on instinct. Otherwise, we humans will be on par with the moths that put out the fire, and eventually face the crisis of being "eliminated".