Certain rural crimes such as poaching, especially poaching with dogs, requires clandestine movement through the bush. In these instances natural light provided by the moon can be desired or avoided.

A moonlit night can significantly improve visibility for both man and dog and would as such be ideal for poachers, but simelarly so, for any anti-poaching initiative and as such the lighter periods may be avoided for this very reason.

There are also various other factors, which influence times chosen to commit rural crimes, which are not related to moon phases. These may include pension payouts, holidays, weekends, specific demands, law enforcement presences and the list goes on.

Poaching done on any given light phase, may have occured on a cloudy or rainy day, which would render the statistical data for these incidents irrelevant. Poachers are not always reliant on the natural light and lighter or darker periods may be preferred by different groups or the moon phases may be inconsequential in the planning of rural crime.

For the above reasons it is difficult to prove the theory that the phases of the moon influence rural crime, despite evidence suggesting a correlation and testimony from poachers and experts in the nature conservation industry.

Then I guess if you were able to look at crime rates in India – and tried to take out all of the factors such as poverty, over-population, unemployment, inequality, lack of education… erm.

No, I don’t see how moonlight can really still be seen as a significantly contributing factor in that case either… :/

* does human activity after sunset show an increase during “full” moons in areas where there are few/no electric lights?

Then you’re going to have to have a very skewed population element, because areas with few/no lights are usually underpopulated, am I right? I would also point out that what you’re NOW asking is going over a wide range of questions involving things like circadian rhythms, perhaps? I can think of an area of the world where there is an example of what you’re saying – the ‘White Nights / Midnight Sun’ regions where there is a correlation between additional light and suicide / violence:

From this paper: “What happens to humans during the arctic summer? Lifestyle changes in a number of ways, and people spend more time outdoors. Sexual activity increases (Shakespeare, 1939), and so does violent behavior (Morken and Linaker, 2000) along with hormonal changes. Melatonin is suppressed by light, and people tend to sleep less. Lack of sleep is a risk factor for a number of psychiatric disorders, such as depression, mania, delirium, and psychosis. Several studies have shown seasonal variations with summer peaks in blood serotonin levels. It has also been demonstrated that increased luminosity increases brain serotonin turnover in men (Lambert et al., 2002) and that blood serotonin levels correlate to violence in men (Moffitt et al., 1998).

Seasonal Variation of Violence in Norway:
…The monthly frequency of violence correlated with the absolute value of monthly change in length of day from the previous month. In the seven cities the highest monthly ratio of observed to expected frequencies increased with latitude. With increasing latitude, the months with the largest increase in violence came later both in the spring and in the fall. CONCLUSIONS: There is a distinct pattern of seasonal variation in the frequency of violence that varies systematically with latitude. This pattern resembles the seasonal pattern of some forms of suicide, hospitalization for affective disorders, and mood and activity in the general population.

* Does ambient light in this setting mean people will move around more or do we stick with the habit of sleep?
Again – I’d suggest checking out sleep behaviour and things like jet lag, too? Whether or not that’s going to correlate with particular sorts of crime, is another question – there’s already been studies on ‘what contributes to criminal behaviour’ and that’s in the blogpost.

* the India one, while reaching a faulty conclusion (some sort of mystical tide thing) might actually contain the data sets relevant to the specific scenario I wondered about since in the 80s most of their population lived without external artificial light at night.

Sorry – what evidence do you have that in the 1980s that there wasn’t electricity in India?

* Basically you’re looking to see if extra light a couple nights a month is a strong enough motivation to get out and do stuff at night to override the habit of sleeping at night; if people want that extra time more than they want their sleep and are willing to disrupt their schedule to get it.

Again – start looking into areas like those up near Greenland and whether it is more likely to overrule circadian rhythms? There’s evidence in research for that. But the influence of the moon really doesn’t seem to be as strong. There just isn’t as much light as you seem to imply, really…

LW – You’ve seem to have forgotten what Dr Atlantis also mentions. Doesn’t it seem odd that lots of light to see – doesn’t also mean ‘lots of light to get caught by’? I’m also mindful that the police are people who often have shift-rosters to get the job done, and there’s already been research into how there are skewed impressions about crime rates and the moon. So, although your point about crime rates being recorded is one good indicator, I think the area of the world you should now be looking at has somewhat changed and also perhaps the time of day?

I think I should rethink my query, in that “violence” was perhaps a behavioral selection I shouldn’t have specified; I was skipping to measurements before describing the data I wanted to collect. The real question might be, does human activity after sunset show an increase during “full” moons in areas where there are few/no electric lights? Don’t get frustrated – it’s a true scientific and logical query, not a mystical one dressed in a labcoat. Read on!

In other words, no psuedo-tidal crap, but basic light levels: as a species we are strongly biased in favor of visual observation of our surroundings. If we can’t see, we hold still. A full moon in a desert lets you see well enough to move around easily; starlight does not. Does ambient light in this setting mean people will move around more or do we stick with the habit of sleep?

To see if there was a difference, you’d have to rule out most of the previous studies you mentioned based on their environment – inside buildings (institutions) have controlled light levels (and premedicated people in controlled environments are a poor selection for measuring our normal wake/sleep habits based on ambient light). You’d have to rule out areas with heavy cloud cover like the UK or Washington state, where the ambient light would be too low to see regardless of whether or not there was a full moon overhead. (Actually, that would be an interesting control to dismiss all those theories that it’s the presence of the moon that does it, regardless of our ability to see the light). You’d have to rule out cities with loads of artificial light – we already see that activity rises after dark in those areas when the lights are on every night. Which is interesting in itself, as the only difference between artificial light and moonlight to us is light intensity and regularity of presence; how much impact does that extra intensity and that regularity have on weather we use it to move around or not?

Your basic study population would be people living in communities with an *unobstructed* view of the night sky and little to no external artificial light in their community, with the control of populations living with an *obstructed* view of the night sky and little to no artificial external artificial light.

Since human activity would include as a subset violent activity, police blotter reports would be one way to track such an uptick; the India one, while reaching a faulty conclusion (some sort of mystical tide thing) might actually contain the data sets relevant to the specific scenario I wondered about since in the 80s most of their population lived without external artificial light at night. It’s harder to find that sort of population these days; what brought it to mind was the fact that I currently live in the middle of one of the darkest expanses of desert in the world, and a local astronomer complained in the local paper about light pollution from the town streetlights & sporting venue lights.

Basically you’re looking to see if extra light a couple nights a month is a strong enough motivation to get out and do stuff at night to override the habit of sleeping at night; if people want that extra time more than they want their sleep and are willing to disrupt their schedule to get it.

If (and that is a big if) the study were to show a positive correlation between the extra light and human activity, then you could extrapolate that data back to times when we had no artificial lights and begin to see the root cause of the myth – people seeing a real increase and not knowing why might ascribe all sorts of motivations to the increased activity, as is seen in the Indian study.

In some ways it makes sense that you’d have enough light to get something done in the dark – but in other ways it seems like escaping in the dark would be easier when the moon is not up.

It would be an interesting thing to see graphed from the time before electric lights went up ’round the world. (Though I suppose gas-lights did as much to dismiss the night as electric lights do today…)