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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…
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.
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
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
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. The. 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.
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 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
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
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.)
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
I hope you get many beautiful snowfalls in your life yet
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Fireflies is a much cooler name though.
Shiny
Anybody tries to kill you, you try and kill 'em right back.
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.
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
