If you could remember, i wrote an Exploratory Data Analysis work on Rain Prediction with Machine Learning which I explained how I was able to predict if rain will fall the next day using Australia dataset, the prediction which I used different machine learning libraries such as:
RandomForest Classifier, gaussian Naive Bayes Classifier, K Nearest Neigbors classifier, XGboost classifier and Catboost classifier
had 86% accuracy and 89 AUC as the best model which was from Catboost classification algorithm.
I was working on the project and also doing the exploratory data analysis of the code so that a I can write about it that night. There was light that night, so everything was normal until they took off the light and the room went dark,in some minute time, i could see flies flying around my laptop screen that i was using to do the coding. i got distracted by these flies because it got me thinking that why is it that some flies
are always attracted towards light, what baffled me the most was that i saw a small cockroach too which kept me wondering that cockroaches love darkness, why is it the opposite this time.
so I decided to investigate the reason why some flies are attracted to light, is it that they get some energy benefit from it or they just want to see the light to be able to navigate around.
first of all, i think we all need to know that the process of flies attraction and repulsion towards light is called phototaxis, and flies that are attracted towards light are said to be positively phototactic and the ones that are drawn away from light are said to be negatively Phototactic.
Although there is no scientific prove of why some flies are drawn to light but there are some theories behind why they are drawn towards it.
The theories behind their behaviour are:
- The positively phototactic flies use the moon to navigate at night, so once they see any light source they mistake it for a moon, which explain why some flies flies round circles in a loop once they reach a glowing object.
- They think of light source as a protection from predators, assuming that light path are unobstructed path or obstacle free area..
- Positively phototactic flies are attracted to Ultra violet light because some flowers which they feed on emit UV ray, Our light also emit UV ray which they mistake as a source of food.
what if there is another reason apart from these theories, some days after this incident, i was able to notice another behaviour in a
Reproductive Stage termite (Alates). I observed that during mating of these termites, their wings always fall off and they are always attracted to light source before this could take place.
what if the light is helping them in one way to make their wings quickly fall or what if they get some energy, maybe from the UV ray of the light source which help them in initiate their mating cells or something relating to such.
These are the questions that i still ask myself, there are still a lot to know about these phototactic flies, this does not explain why a cockroach I saw that night was moving around my laptop screen,since we know cockroaches to be negatively phototactic in nature.
well,the simple explanation i can give to that is, maybe the cockroach is an outlier in that aspect, for example, if we have hundred cockroaches, 99 of it may be brown and the remaining one could be white, so we can say the
white cockroach is an outlier, i think same thing applies to the cockroach i saw that day.
This is just my own suggestions, it wasn't proven by any scientist, but there are theories laid down which I have explained above,but you should know that they are just theories, and there are still more to understand about it.
If you think you need more information on this, check the link below:
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