These Moth Memes Are The Light Of Our Lives Right Now
There's a new meme out there. I'm not going to lie to you, it's weird as hell. It's about moths and lamps and the weirdly relatable connection between the two. I'm pretty sure it's also about the human condition.
Let me illuminate what I mean here. The memes look like this:
The premise is a pretty simple. The moth has a one track mind, and that one track is always hurtling toward lamps. Over the past few weeks, people are having a lot of fun online by acknowledging this weird quirk of everyone's favorite formerly-cocooned1 creature.
Adding to the fun is this close-up photo of a moth, which when viral on Reddit after user No_Reason27 shared it to the Creepy subreddit at the start of summer:
Photoshopping this dude into any image of someone wanting literally anything is instant comedy:
Especially if that thing is a lamp, light or even an ominously glowing orb:
Part of the reason these memes can stay so wholesome yet also be almost universally funny is most everyone has watched a moth bang its head into a lamp over and over and over again. The sound and the image are fairly iconic parts of summers gone by.
Over at Inverse, reporter Peter Hess tried to investigate why moths do this and he discovered that the scientific community actually has a handful of hypotheses about the subject with no clear answer. It's either A) moths evolved to use light to navigate and lamps give them an intense sensory overload, B) moths confuse light sources for their natural food sources: flowers, or C) moths think they want to have sex with lamps. As per that last one:
It sounds bizarre, but this hypothesis had some scientific support. In 1977, USDA entomologist Philip Callahan published a paper in the journal Applied Opticssuggesting that moths may confuse the infrared radiation coming from flames and electric lights for sex pheromones. In the paper, Callahan wrote that the sex pheromone, acetate, released by the female cabbage looper moth (Trichoplusia ni) bears the same spectral emission pattern as the infrared radiation given off by a candle. In other words, for a moth that can detect light in the infrared spectrum, a candle's heat might look like a female moth that wants to mate.
[Inverse]
And that brings us to the unsettling part of this meme. Creepier than any close-up on a moth face, weirder than reading the word "bröther" over and over, is the odd idea that moths are just like us. They… want things. Sometimes they want things so bad they'll hurt themselves while chasing after them. And, yeah, sure, usually those things they're chasing turn out to be lamps, a thing that more than likely they never actually wanted at all.
But isn't that what we do, too? Humans want things. We want food, shelter, love, affection, security, attention, sex and fake internet points. And sometimes we think we're chasing after them and we do weird and dumb stuff and we cause harm to ourselves or the people around us only to find out we were chasing the wrong thing. We're just like moths. Which brings me to this role-reversal meta tweet…
Yeah.
Anyway, if you haven't launched into an full-blown existential crisis yet and you'd like to make you own moth meme with the infamous insect himself, here's a pre-photoshopped version of the little guy without the background. Just right click on him, hit "Save Image As…" and do your thing, you memer, you:
Now go forth and chase those sweet internet points like a moth to a… well, you know.
