In movies, stories and even in survival tv shows they tell you that a fire protects you from attacks of predators during the night. Why and how does it work?

Question

Are there exceptions?

In: Biology

Answer 1

There is a lot of logical sounding explanations here, but as an ecologist I think the reason is simply that most nocturnal animals stay away from highly lit environments, because that would give away their own advantage of being adapted to dark environments. This would make it a lot more probable for them to become prey and give the preyed upon individual more time to react. Hence they avoid it, unless pressed by starvation. In nature, a predator will only attack if it 100% sure it has a clear advantage. Otherwise the energy need would not outweigh the risk of loosing the prey (and hence the energy used) and/or injury (and therefore likely death). So it is plain and simple genetic coding caused by evolutionary pressures.

I have not read any sources or come across any studies on this particular topic, but I have done a bit of field work and research on light pollution and its effect on insect feeding bats. And here it is the above mentioned reason, among a few others.