Brett Seymoure

Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellow, Living Earth Collaborative

“The main aim of the research we're doing this summer is to quantify how different arthropods, such as spiders and ticks, are active at different times of the day, and how that is driven by natural light cycles.

I'm a behavioral ecologist, so I'm interested in that from an evolutionary standpoint—niche partitioning based on light as a resource. But I'm also a conservation biologist, so I'm very interested in how lighting technologies have distracted these temporal niches from being natural over the last hundred years. We need to understand what the natural temporal niches are so that we can understand the effects of light pollution.”

How might stay-at-home orders be affecting light pollution?

“With light pollution, the sources are the government, corporations and people. The government and corporations are going to continue to use lights at night. Big industrial plants and skyscrapers keep their lights on, and the government isn’t shutting off lights for transportation networks. Perhaps one could make an argument that there were a lot fewer headlights on the road in March and April, but we don’t really know what the impacts of headlights are. In fact, that’s one of the studies we hope to do this summer at Tyson. So it’s really tough to make a prediction about the effects of COVID on light pollution.”

What are you looking forward to next summer at Tyson?

“I have no idea what's going to happen in one month, six months or a year. I'm not trying to plan anything ahead. I would really love for Tyson to get back to a somewhat normal state where you can have all the undergraduate fellows actually at Tyson—even if it's socially distanced—and there’s an actual community, in-person at Tyson. Right now, I'm just with my dog in a far remote place in Tyson with no human interaction. As a first-timer, it’s been difficult to learn the ways of Tyson because no one’s there, but it sounds like so much fun.”

Brett studies the effects of light pollution on wildlife behavior. Learn more about his visual ecology research here.