Why do flying creatures find it really easy to get in windows when slightly opened, but have trouble exiting when you open the door to let them out?
In: Biology
It probably takes a lot of time for such a lucky thing to enter through the window. After all, the panic caused after facing a human will confuse the poor thing.
It might only appear they have an easier time getting in rather than out since you are only analyzing the few that found their way in making it appear to have a 100% success rate.
Judging by the handful of birds that have died trying to fly into my large living room window, and the fact I have only had a single live bird make it into my house, I think they have just as much trouble coming in as they do going out.
If there’s thousands of insects flying by your window on a given day and one happens to find its way in, it might have a similar chance of finding its way out. That is, very low.
It seems easy to get in, probably isn’t.
But once in, the environment is completely different, filled with weird objects and shapes and colors, and seems closed like a cave. They panic, and only see what looks like exits (glass) in which they slam they don’t know why…
Its a mess.
Say there are 100 bugs flying outside your cracked window. After 1 hour, one of those bugs manages to find its way through the crack.
That’s 1% of the population that has managed to find the crack in 1 hour.
Now consider the situation from the inside — if it took 1 hour for 1 bug of the 100 to find its way through, what chance does that single bug have to find the crack to escape?
This is a situation very closely related to entropy, and you might find [Maxwell’s Demon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon) an interesting concept to read up on.
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