Naturalistic questions 2026

Do bats systematically take advantage of street lights in their feeding behavior?
- In the summer I often see bats flying back and forth along a line of street lights on a straight street. They seem to be doing a very specific circuit up and down a line, going from one to the other and then circling back and repeating. Do they do this because the prey are there, attracted to the light? Do they use the light at all for hunting (spotting insects via silhouette). Do they purposefully pick out street light sections which are essentially "lanes" where they can just run a tight loop around them in an elongated running track shape?
Long-jawed orb-weavers:
- In the summer I saw a half dozen of these in webs near the lake, closely connected to each other over small sapling branches. Flys would hit the webs frequently and the orb weavers would pounce very fast and seem to consume them on the spot. The spiders would stretch their legs to straighten themselves in a thin resting pose as if twigs. They also seemed to have semi social behavior. Frequently stepping into each other's webs, avoiding and sometimes threatening each other. It wasn't clear if each of their webs were even their own or if they were just borrowing each other's. What would make spiders evolve like this to have semi gregarious behavior? I've seen these spiders before, but never seen bunches of them interacting together. Spiders generally seem solitary so this caught my eye.