Lifelong exposure to artificial light at night impacts stridulation and locomotion activity patterns in the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus

This dataset contains data from a laboratory experiments described in the paper: “Levy, K., Wegrzyn, Y., Efronny, R., Barnea, A., & Ayali, A. 2021 Lifelong exposure to artificial light at night impacts stridulation and locomotion activity patterns in the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus. Proc. R. Soc. B 20211626. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.162”. 

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is increasing worldwide,with most of the world population living under light-polluted skies. Growing awareness of the harmful effects of ALAN calls for more comprehensive understanding of these effects. The stridulation and locomotion patterns of adult male crickets reared under different lifelong ALAN intensities were monitored simultaneously for five consecutive days in custom-made anechoic chambers. Activity periods and acrophases were compared between the experimental groups.

Control crickets exhibited a robust rhythm, stridulating at night and demonstrating locomotor activity during the day. In contrast, ALAN affected both the relative level and timing of the crickets’ nocturnal and diurnal activity. ALAN induced free-running patterns, manifested in significant changes in the median and variance of the activity periods, and even arrhythmic behavior. The magnitude of disruption was light intensity dependent, revealing an increase in the difference between the activity periods calculated for stridulation and locomotion in the same individual.

Our results demonstrate that ecologically-relevant ALAN intensities affect crickets’ behavioral patterns, and may lead to decoupling of locomotion and stridulation behaviors at the individual level, and to loss of synchronization at the population level.

Methods
The dataset was collected during a laboratory experiment, in which crickets were submitted to different intensities of lifelong artificial light at night (ALAN). The data has been processed by a series of analyzes (mostly non-parametrical due to inequality of variances) to produce a manuscript accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.