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Are actually that bright? Where I live they are very dim and green.
Ghibli even made a movie about them
Tumbler has one of the worst comment layouts…
It brings me unimaginable sadness to know that my recently born nephew will grow up in such a region, when just a few years ago you could see hundreds of these guys in any given back yard
I hate blankets of grass so much
Leave your leaves in autumn!
We’ve been living at the same house for about a decade. We have a tiny tiny creek in our back yard with some unmowed area around it. Our yard is chemical free and we have tons of pollinators. We saw single digit numbers of lightning bugs for nearly the time we lived here. Never more than two a night and most nights none showed up.
The past few years we’ve seen an uptick. Not loads, but they seem to be making a small comeback. At least in our yard.
I lived most of my life in areas where fireflies were around, but they weren’t the bioluminescent type,
The house I moved to about 5 years ago is in the woods and 3 months out of the year these guys buzz around my front yard and I’ve even helped a few out of the house.
They never fail to bring a smile to my face.
First one of the year is always a treat. Then I remember how many there were as a kid and it makes me sad.
Please, switch to red outdoor lights if possible, and if you can’t do that, shade your outdoor lights so that it only illuminates specific areas. Fireflies are affected by light pollution.
Also, don’t rake your leaves, or if you do have to take, try to sequester them in an area on your property, (I’m currently using my leaves as “sunkill” for garden and flower beds.) fireflies lay eggs on leaf litter, if you dispose of the leaves, you dispose of the eggs.
I treat my yard as a natural meadow the best I can. I only mow once or twice a year and we’re slowly pushing out the grass previously planted. I dislike the look of a traditional boomer suburbia yard. I much prefer the wild look.
We don’t rake at all. I prefer to just let things do their thing and I’m also far too lazy to bother raking. We live in an area surrounded by woods.
We have snakes and foxes and hares that come out of the woods from time to time. A ton of birds. It’s perfect.
I wish I could let mine go, but there are city ordnances I have to follow. My “yard theory” is to break up the the whole lot with trees, bushes, flower beds, and garden plots, to the point that I can “mow” with just a weedwaker.
You would not believe your eyes
When ten thousand fireflies
You already messed up on the second sentence man, its ten million, not ten thousand
Well, shit
edit: in my defense, |i’ve never seen a single firefly, so ten thousand would be enough for me not to believe my eyes
Bioluminescence is actual magic. I will take no calls on this matter.
The definition of magic I go by is “affecting consciousness in accordance with will”, and when you’re going to watch fireflies with the thought in mind to appreciate them aesthetically, then yes, they are actual magic.
https://norse-mythology.org/concepts/magic/
Magic produces change by working directly with consciousness. Its effects often spill over into the physical world, but this occurs only indirectly. This is, in an important sense, the exact opposite of what modern science does. Science causes changes in the physical world in accordance with the “laws” of the physical world. Magic and science not only work by different means; they also work toward different ends, and, in fact, this difference in ends accounts for the difference in means. This is why practitioners of magic don’t conduct laboratory experiments, and why scientists don’t intone chants before altars inscribed with emotionally powerful symbols. The apologists for the conventions of our own age often claim that magic is a “primitive,” immature groping toward science, and now that science has arrived, magic is obsolete. But science and magic are different enterprises altogether. Neither can entirely supersede the other. Indeed, as will be discussed below, magic is as alive and well in the modern world as it’s ever been – it’s just been brilliantly disguised
Eh, what fireflies can do is kinda the base level of the bioluminescence ‘skill’ of the evolutionary tech tree.
https://gizmodo.com/glowing-deep-sea-squid-have-a-complex-form-of-communica-1842472534
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DE89YY7zCio
Humboldt squid skin is bioluminiscent, but roughly akin to a flexible lcd or oled screen, with many different ‘pixels’ capable of being set specifically.
They likely have the ability to communicate by basically displaying different patterns of different colors and brightnesses and translucency, sorta like a human walking around with a sandwich board made of lcd screens, which they can control with a phone app.
They may very well have an entire language they can convey via sequenced or at least specific patterns.
Note: No clue if you can actually trace bioluminescence in fireflies and certain cephalopods to the same common ancestor or if its completely different, independent evolutionary occurances, but my point is there are certainly more and less complex and utility granting forms of bioluminescence.
“I cast 200 μg Luciferin.”
[Dice noises]
“Nat 15. Your abdomen glows and dims slowly and rhythmically.”
Pathfinder 2e literally has bioluminescence bombs that’s just jarred firefly juice that’s secreted by humanoid fey that resemble the bugs
Magic exists but we call it science
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
- Michael Scott?
- Terry Pratchett
Nah Pratchett is “just because you understand it doesn’t stop it from being magic”
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Spelling it without help is also magic, so I hear ya.
Hell ya. Real magic is the feelings we felt along the way. Swimming in bioluminescent waters is one of my favorite life experiences
Humans are bioluminescent, too! But it’s too dim for anything to actually be able to see, so it’s no fun.
Is that “article” trying to say we’re exothermic and thus glow in the infrared?
Short answer: no
Long answer:
In scientific terms, the glow comes from chemical reactions within our bodies. These chemical reactions besides generating energy and producing heat also produce free radicals – atoms or molecules that have a lone, isolated electron. That makes these radicals highly reactive setting off a series of energetic chemical reactions as they interact with various fats and proteins in our cells. The glow is produced when these reactions involve fluorophores – molecules that give off photons (elementary particles of light).
Fuckin bio-lights how do they work
We used to have so many of them when I was a kid. Their numbers are dwindling. 😭
Saw this just the other day here…
The less I maintain my yard the more lightning bugs we get.
We do not maintain our back yard very well. I refuse to let these amazing insects disappear. We also seed for pollinators as well.
I never lived anywhere near them, never seen a bioluminescent creature in my life despite my wish to do so.
But when I was about 6 years old, I have a weird memory of my parents driving out to the deep desert with me and we parked off some dirt road and my dad got out of the truck for maybe a half hour. My mom seemed nervous. I saw a green light at the base of a bush about 15 feet away from the vehicle, just a tiny little bright green light, solid color, middle of nowhere.
I asked my mom what it was and she said “it’s a glowworm” and I asked if we could go look at it and she snapped “NO don’t go outside!” and I was absolutely boggled what was going on. My dad came back, they drove out of there without a word. One of those life mysteries we all have tucked away in our memory banks. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t dreaming, but it’s getting back there in years, probably was early 80’s now. (This was the Sonoran desert in winter, there are no “glow worms” out there, and no bugs generally coming out in the cold anyway. I lived there for decades, there are no bioluminescent critters there.)
The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor’s yards. I’m the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.
A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.
I feel a little bad for the pest control guy that showed up at my house last spring. I majored in Biology, but did not graduate, my partner has their Masters in Biology and wrote their thesis on ecological damage from heavy metals.
Yeah, my yard looks a little unmanaged, sure, you can see bugs all over the milkweed, that’s intentional. My yard was visited by thousands of bees (and sadly) a dozen or so butterflies daily. Because we had the insects and native plants, we had lots of small birds, and becuase we had lots of small birds, we were lucky enough to have a local Cooper’s Hawk as a regular visitor nearly every day.
The guy offered to do indoor services for spiders and termites. I told him I don’t have any of those because I have a bunch of basement centipedes. He said he could spray for those, and I was like “Why? They’re harmless and they’re the reason I don’t have dangerous spiders and termites in the house”.
My neighbours use to warn me about ticks every summer and how they proliferate in the grass. Since my yard has been a safe haven for lizards I haven’t found a single tick.
coming from australia, this is super real… we have such a unique set of animals and plants that it’s all just so normal to us, but then you travel overseas and everything is like what you see on tv and in movies
i’m mid 30s, and last year i saw snow falling for the first time in chicago… snow falling is beautiful, and to most of the world it’s just normal - to australians, it just never happens
Snowfall is probably one of the best sensations in nature. It’s just so calming and peaceful.
Seeing how Australians react to kangaroos like they’re just slightly more dangerous deer is so jarring
To be fair, they mostly are just slightly more dangerous deer
At least deer act like prey animals
Kangaroos would learn their place pretty quick if humans started hunting them with pointy sticks again 😤
i mean, we hunt them with guns now so i’m not sure a pointy stick will change their point of view :p
Deer will mostly run the hell away. Roos OTOH, sometimes you gotta punch back.
(For those rare folk who haven’t seen that video, he was getting it off his dog.)
I hope you get many beautiful snowfalls in your life yet
Growing up, they were indigenous where I lived. After I moved away, it was so surreal no not see random lights in the back yard during the summer nights.
I grew up calling them lightning bugs, and I’m so excited to see a thread full of people calling them the same!
Fireflies is a much cooler name though.
Anybody tries to kill you, you try and kill 'em right back.
Shiny
In German, they’re Glühwürmchen (“glow worms”).
Wait hold up, in Dutch we have glimwormen (“shimmer worms” ) but those don’t fly! They’re actual bioluminecent worms.
Aren’t German Glühwürmchen the same thing?
Glühwürmchen definitely refers to the flying variant. Might also refer to non flying species but I’ve never seen or heard anyone talk about any of those. The term is probably just used for any type of glowing insect, no matter if worm or bug.
Interesting, interesting. We call the female lightning bugs here glow worms because they are wingless, but today I’m learning that is not the case for all species!
Also Glühwürmchen is a cute word.
I know a girl in south carolina who wasn’t from there; she saw lightning bugs for the first time there one summer and she started crying. I find that story very touching- its a reminder not to be blind to the beauty of the world, even if that beauty is so common that it’s unremarkable.
I see beautiful and common things that people around just shoulder shrug about.
Saw a black bear mama with two cubs last month, a coyote dancing playfully the next week. This week the water lilies are starting to explode across the local swamp. In that same swamp are hundreds, if not 1,000+, endangered pitcher plants and common sundews. Even at work there are several species of songbird in the garden section and raptors patrol the skies.
My mom grew up in an area of California with no fireflies. When she was a teenager, she went on a cross-country trip with a friend. In the mountains of North Carolina, they were driving along at night when some bugs hit the windshield of their car. They didn’t think much of it… until the bug guts started glowing. Then they screamed.
Also, people are born every day, and some just go on with their lives never learning about random facts like these. Every day, someone is one of the lucky 10k.
Man, imagine seeing a field of fireflies IRL for the first time, if you had never heard of them before! That would be pretty mindblowing.
I knew about them but didn’t see them well into adulthood. It’s underwhelming
Really? I’m a seasoned adult-er, and I still get a little flicker of wonder when i see those lights floating in the field behind my house on summer evenings.
I feel like fireflies have to be pretty perfectly whelming? like on the level of a swarm of pretty butterflies: cool, but not that cool.
I don’t know man, I’ve seen an actual swarm of butterflies (it took days for them to fly through) and it was pretty fucking awesome.
I think it’s just because the only idea I had was from cartoons. They don’t exist where I’m from.
They are still eery and cool though.
Your mum is underwhelming.
Indeed, she doesn’t shine at all
Whelming always goes for the MILFs.
I grew up in the American southwest and I saw them for the first time last summer. I probably looked crazy to people, a guy in his late 20s taking pictures and videos of bugs along the road to send to my family, but I was genuinely mystified
I thought I was seeing spots on the edge of my vision or something before I realized what they were. I always thought they were constantly emitting light, not twinkling
No fireflies where I live, but that doesn’t mean my childhood was free of a beautiful insect swarm.
My area had a bad outbreak of cockchafers I got to enjoy.
And an equally beautiful name for that fine insect
I have never heard of that insect.
Despite the name and status as a pest (they are literally European scarabs), I feel nostalgic whenever I see one. Farmers ruthlessly fought them, so there hasn’t been a swarming event here in at least 20 years.
Lightning bugs swarm??? That’s simultaneously awesome and terrifying, or maybe terrifyingly awesome. Now I want to see a lightning bug swarm even more than an intense meteor storm.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park has a “Lightning Bug Lottery” every year, a certain number of passes are randomly given out to applicants to see the park at night during peak breeding season for fireflies. Supposedly they will all sync up their lights and converge in a huge group on one tree.
I’ve seen a smaller event once in my hometown. Just a whole tree was sparkling for a few minutes. I think the most amazing thing about it is the light doesn’t really show up well on a camera, so you kinda have to just put your phone down and enjoy it with your eyes. The only place you can keep that moment is in your mind.
Lightning bugs, aka Fireflies, are harmless. Their little butts just emit flashes of light from internal chemical reaction, like a short lived glow stick. If you encounter a field with a bunch of them, it’s real pretty.
