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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
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
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.
We don’t have any such things here in Darkonia.
OWW! Fucking coffee table!
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.
Is no one going to point out that it looks like Sauron’s eye between the index and middle fingers?
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.
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.
And an equally beautiful name for that fine insect
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.
Shiny
Anybody tries to kill you, you try and kill 'em right back.
In German, they’re Glühwürmchen (“glow worms”).
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.
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.
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.
We used to have so many of them when I was a kid. Their numbers are dwindling. 😭
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.
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 tried to go this route with my small backyard. Unfortunately invasive vines (creeping Charlie and English ivy) got entrenched in very short order and outcompeted almost everything else. Pulling up the vines left nearly bare earth that eroded very quickly. If I ever get the money and the time, I’m going to have to add soil and seed and tend to it properly. For the time being, I left most of last season’s leaves (mostly oak) and put down netting is some of the worst areas to try and keep the wind from stripping it bare(er). I’m hoping this leads to better water retention and soil conditions, and not just hiding spots for more vines. 😕
If possible, spread some local seed packs for pollinators on the bare dirt. Should be able to find some for your region/state. Better than letting the regular weeds take over.
That’s the problem, nothing has taken over. It’s just bare cracked clay because the soil is gone. My target for seeding is white clover, which technically isn’t local but it’s been around so long it might as well be. I can’t let things grow too long unless I want to check for ticks every time I go outside. Clover seems to be a nice compromise. I’ve long ago given up the fight against dandelions, much to the neighbors’ chagrin.
The yard is unfortunately pretty far down the priority list, which is annoying because it’s probably one of the more satisfying projects once it’s stabilized. But lack of funds and spoons dictates the effort must go elsewhere.
I saw that the other day too. It’s just that 35 years ago, everyone still raked their lawns. Same as 35 years before that.
Bioluminescence is actual magic. I will take no calls on this matter.
Magic exists but we call it science
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
- Michael Scott?
- Terry Pratchett
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?
Nah, it legit is, though. Just because someone or most someones understand how something happens doesn’t mean it isn’t magic anymore. It just means that we have a hard magic system. We understand our magic so well that we’ve stopped seeing it as magical, but if you take a step back and take a look at the big picture it becomes clear that the world is magical, and everything around us is this amazing, often confusing, incredible tapestry of Wonder and awe. The world has just ground us down so much that we feel like wonder is strictly for children, that we’re not allowed to feel wonder anymore. Embrace the magic. Even if you know how it works.
Sometimes I stop to think about the fact that a tiny electrical impulse in my brain can cause my fingers to move and press buttons on my keyboard, which in turn causes larger, but still small electrical impulses to trigger a shiny rock we trapped lightning in to do an immense number of calculations, to send a stream of further impulses to my network router, which sends them on to another router, and another, and on and on, each step might go via a wire, or radio, or the flashing of a tiny light, or even bounce off of a satellite in space and back to another router, until it eventually finds it’s way to a server, which does huge numbers of further calculations, then sends impulses back to me, and also to other servers, via just as remarkable a route, which in turn send impulses down wires and optical fibres and bouncing off of satellites until one of those streams of impulses gets to your router, where it gets sent on to your shiny lightning rock, which performs many calculations and causes a pattern of light and dark dots to appear in front of you, which cause a series of tiny electrical impulses in your brain, that you perceive have meaning.
The natural world is filled with magic and wonder, but this is a magic we designed and built ourselves.
I like going deeper, just imagining the stupid number of atoms, interactions and things even someone with vast knowledge about don’t truly understand.
And to add more, I play games via cloud gaming, and even after thousands and thousands of hours with it, it blows me away all the time.
An electric impulse in my brain sends a signal to my finger which then presses a button on a device that sends a signal to another device, computer, then another device, router, then many many other devices along the way to the server centre where a computer reacts to that signal and changes something in a stupidly complex simulation, then the visual, audial and haptic responses are calculated and sent through all those devices back to my screen and to my experience it seems instant.
So many incredibly complicated things happening thousands of times every second and traveling thousands of miles back and forth and for hours on end with very few failures. It’s just astounding.
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
Spelling it without help is also magic, so I hear ya.
Fuckin bio-lights how do they work
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
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.
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.
Your mum is underwhelming.
Whelming always goes for the MILFs.
Indeed, she doesn’t shine at all
these guys are great!
I was also blown away the first time I’ve seen bioluminescent bacteria on some strip algae…you would pass your finger by them and see the hidden binary encoded alien messages
One of the cool things about living in Ohio for a couple years, didn’t exist in Texas where I was raised.
Also significantly fewer roaches. In my experience they’re more common in the south due to the warmer weather
Mayflys tho, that was something I hadn’t even conceived of lol
Different areas have different lightning bugs too. The ones in southern ontario are not the same as the ones in the midwest US.
They have distinct blinking patterns as well. IIRC observing the pattern is one of the ways used to classify them.
Except when it’s a firefly pretending to be a different species of firefly.
and colours!
