Chapter 1: What magical experience do synchronous fireflies create?
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here. And a few weeks ago, I went on a wild nighttime ride. We're in this like cart that this lady is biking us around with a dog. And we're looking for bugs. Friend of the show and wonderful, beloved reporter Ping Wong was there.
We are loaded up here in the cargo wagon. Cargo bike.
Chapter 2: Why are fireflies important to their ecosystem?
Cargo bike. And we are very tightly pushed in. And Ping is a patient, patient woman. And she has a dog on one side of her and me smushing her on the other side. It was a tight fit. It was. I felt terrible pain. Because you had organized this trip to see something very specific and very special.
It's true, Gina. We were out on a bike trail at 9 p.m. on a weekday for a reason. And even though there were cars zooming past us, planes flying overhead, the conditions were actually totally perfect.
Chapter 3: What unique behaviors do synchronous fireflies exhibit?
They were magical.
Like, I'm looking out into the marsh and I'm seeing all these, like, the darkness and bushes. And then you just see, like, pops of light. It feels like a fairy tale. I keep on seeing... Yeah, it was the magic time of summer in and around Washington, D.C., when you can see fireflies.
Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Blinking their belly lanterns on and off. So long as you know where to look.
Today on the show, the brief and wondrous adult lives of fireflies. We'll take you on a trip down the East Coast to see some special species.
Chapter 4: How do fireflies synchronize their flashing lights?
And we'll talk about why some are endangered and how you can help. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, so a few weeks ago on a hot, humid night, we saw an incredible firefly show, a.k.a. lightning bug show. And seriously, Ping, it was this random little patch of dense forest like sandwiched in between the airport and the parkway.
Right. That little protected marsh between the bike path and the Potomac River was actually the perfect habitat for some fireflies. So there's a lot of different species, but what they all seem to have in common is a love for warm, humid environments, maybe some tall grass, and definitely some standing water. Seriously, one of the big enemies of fireflies is drought.
So why is water so important to fireflies?
Well, I say it's the water and the dirt, and both of these are important to their life cycles. So
Chapter 5: What are the life stages of a firefly?
Fireflies are beetles. And so they've got that four-part life cycle. They start as eggs, then they hatch as larva. And the larval stage is actually where they spend most of their lives. They can spend up to one to two years crawling around underground, eating other invertebrates. And then they burrow down generally into the ground.
This is called their pupal stage, and it can last a couple of weeks. And This is where they really transform themselves. Then they emerge as full adults, and that's when people like us, walking around at night, can see them flying around and flashing in fields and trees. I spoke with Lynn Fyerson-Faust. She's author of A Firefly Field Guide to the Eastern and Central U.S.
Chapter 6: Why are some firefly species endangered?
and Canada, and she says that adult stage is relatively brief.
A lot of these species, many of them, they flash 20 minutes a night, and that's it. And they only live two weeks. So if you're not standing in the right place at the right time, looking the right direction, you'll miss them.
Yeah, I mean, it was a brilliant light show that we saw a few weeks ago. And we caught like the tail end of this year's peak of fireflies in northern Virginia, right? Right.
And right now it doesn't look like that anymore. And when the fireflies peak depends a lot on how hot and humid it's been in the weeks and months just before it.
Okay, Ping, so those weren't the only fireflies you saw this summer, though, right? I know you're dying to tell me more.
Yes, absolutely.
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Chapter 7: How can we help protect firefly populations?
So you're right. Earlier in the season, I actually went on a trip looking for fireflies down at Congaree National Park, which is near Columbia, South Carolina. since further south where it's hotter and humid. The fireflies come out earlier. And I went to see a specific behavioral phenomenon, synchronous fireflies.
These are hundreds, thousands of fireflies that are all coordinating across a large expanse of nature. So they're blinking all at the same time.
Oh, that sounds really, really cool. Can you only see them in South Carolina?
Okay, well, they're rare, but they're not that rare. So there's just a few species of synchronous fireflies in the U.S. Congaree, where I went, has one kind, and the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee has another.
Chapter 8: What is the impact of light pollution on fireflies?
Lynn Frierson-Fest has seen both kinds.
What the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has is Photinus carolinus. That is completely different from what is here at Congaree, is Futuris frontalis. Different genus, different everything. She says that even the way that they flash is different. Carolinas do this explosion of flashes for three seconds, and then the whole forest goes dark for six seconds.
The Congaree synchrony is constant, like that.
Weird.
Yeah. And Regina, that's exactly what I saw. When it got dark, like really dark in the forest, I started seeing these little flashes in the trees. You know, at first it was like a couple of them blinking randomly. And then as more and more of them joined in, I started to see this pattern emerging like a rolling wave of lights.
And then at some point they synced up perfectly, at least to my human eye, and they were all flashing at once. And that was a pattern that they kept up for a little while before it just sort of went back through the cycle all over again.
It makes me think of those drone fireworks. I mean, it did look like LED lights a little bit. Yeah. How are they coordinating, though? How are they doing this?
Well, that's still kind of a mystery, something researchers are trying to figure out. So when I was down at Congaree, I met up with Arit Peleg. She's a computer scientist and biophysicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And Orit had come to the Congaree with some folks in her lab to study how this firefly synchrony works.
She says that there does seem to be this evolutionary advantage to having a whole swarm of fireflies blinking at the same time. It boosts their signal, makes them more visible to their mates down on the ground.
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