Really interesting point on the white night-attractors, Ron!

I don't remember the rod vs cone composition of an insect eye - I know animal eyes better. But I'm willing to bet it's mostly or completely made up of rods for nocturnal insects. Rods are activated with much lower levels of light, but can't detect differences in wavelengths (ie, their black and white). While cones detect color differences, but require more light to become active.

That's why when it's really dark, you can't see colors, it's also why the very dim stars can only be seen out of the corner of your eye (the fovea, or central part of the retina, that captures the image you're looking directly at, is very densely packed with cones in humans, with few rods. There's a high concentration of rods in the periphery of the retina, which would "see" the dim star, but only if you don't look directly at it.

If night pollinators require better night visition, as one would guess, they'd want rods and not cones. If so, they couldn't detect color anyway. Neat theory and it makes sense.

They only thing I've seen on insect eyes is they're internal mechanisms to detect polorized light (linking visual input to time of day, based on the angle of the sunlight). That's very very cool, but Diane whigs out over eyeball talk, so I'll shut up now.

McNerd