If the angle between your direction of travel and the sun or the moon remains constant, you will be traveling in an almost perfectly straight line. If the angle between your direction of travel and a street lamp remains constant, you will travel in a spiral.

Lamps confuse moths, because they rely on the sun and moon for navigation. It would be like if you repainted road lines to send cars on head-on collision courses, or made all four directions of a traffic light green at the same time at a blind intersection.

Humans experience a similar phenomenon too. We rely on the force of gravity acting on our vestibular sense (in the inner ear) to detect which way is up. If you spin a around a bunch really fast, it disturbs your vestibular sense and you will not be able to stand up straight and will keep falling down. It doesn’t matter that your eyes are working fine: the vestibular sense is so tightly ingrained in our sense of “up” that 20:20 vision and a clear mind cannot compensate for its absence.

It’s important to understand this, because it helps people understand it has nothing to do with moths being mindlessly attracted to light. It is because humans have introduced unnatural sources of light which are extremely disorienting to moths because of the way they experience and sense the world. We should be compassionate towards moths and try to reduce light pollution so they can guide themselves by the moon, just as our ancestors guided themselves by the stars.

OK, this is the first mothpost that got me. Nice job OP.

…don’t care about anyone else, enjoying the resurgence of LAMP memes…

this is the best one so far

This is my favorite one yet.

I can hear this one in my head

now this is gold

But it’s not that kind of lamp?!

I must have it