Emily Chan
Is driving during a full moon risky? Well, there are more dangers than you think, especially for the animals that come out at night.
In Texas, vehicle collisions with wildlife increased by 45.8 percent during a full moon compared to a new moon. The spike was more prominent in rural areas than in urban areas.
To come to this conclusion, researchers collected collision data across Texas over a period of 10 years and compared how many took place during the full moon and the new moon, when the night is totally dark.
Previously, studies have shown a correlation between wildlife collisions and the full moon in other regions, such as Canada, Spain, and Lithuania. So, the research team wanted to see if the same would hold true in Texas.
“I compared really dark nights without moon illumination (new moon) to really dark nights with the full moon illumination,” said Kentaro Iio, a co-author of the new study and a former student at Texas A&M University.
“If you include other lunar phases in the analysis, they appear on the horizon at different times each day, making it more difficult for true apples-to-apples comparisons.”
While there was an average increase of almost 46 percent in wildlife-vehicle collisions during the full moon, there was no major rise in vehicle-vehicle collisions or vehicle-pedestrian ones.
Some areas saw particularly significant increases in collisions on nights with a full moon, including the High Plains, South Texas, Central Texas, and the Upper East regions.
The spikes in collisions ranged from 57.8 percent to 125 percent. The researchers suggested that the high increases in wildlife collisions could be due to several reasons, such as driver fatigue at night and more wildlife activity during the full moon.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
