The firefly population could be declining
wesa.fm
wesa.fm
"Fireflies!"
"No, really! Fireflies are made up!"
See, she grew up in the desert and thought stories about fireflies were in with fairies and elves.
Anyway, haven't seen that again since. Now I know why.
It's always cool when people visit us in the summer who have lived on the west coast their entire lives. Their first impressions of fireflies, as adults, is fun to watch.
We hosted an exchange student from China, who had spent his entire life in a major city, and he expected fireflies to be hot to the touch. I still get a lot of them in my yard, but I also don't treat my lawn with anything other than what falls from the sky.
Do people spread poison on their lawn? Why?
The active ingredient here is bifenthrin, which has been (mostly) banned in the EU since 2019. This product is marketed for killing those "unsavory" bugs and promoting plant growth, but it is also extremely lethal to bees.
I'm sure that my neighbors dislike the clover in my yard, but I've got bees buzzing about over here and they have a pristine-but-sterile landscape.
It doesn't stop the ticks, they are extremely resilient and don't use lawns as their primary habitat. It does massive damage to the local insect population though.
Also, DEET is a lot less nasty than most people think, and very effective without destroying the ecosystem.
It's kind of a horrible way to go, for a bug, in that it's a mechanical insecticide and it's like us walking on broken glass. Ants will walk to the line, touch it, and then immediately turn around. I puff it around the perimeter of my house and it keeps any crawling insect at bay until it rains again. If you can puff it under baseboards it will stay dry in there for ages.
It's non-toxic, but you probably don't want to breathe in the dust. That applies to all fine particles, though.
How often are these events? The last time we saw that many fireflies was 20 years ago.
But take that with a grain of salt, it’s not like I’ve done research here, that’s just my feel. And I’m pretty sure the big fields I see them in regularly don’t get hit with pesticides.
I've also seen a plethora of other native bugs that I've never seen before, but that could just be due to the fact that I wasn't really very interested in them before.
Leaving sections of our yard a little more wild, and bird and insect population went up, this includes lightning bugs, which we continue to get in abundance (we're in a reasonably urban area).
I've planted milkweed, it took a few years, but now we get monarchs every year too.
Jonathan Franzen wrote a great article on this that went viral (considering the topic) a few years ago https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture . He basically argues that the cataclysmic worries about climate change should not paralyze us to make changes that promote local conservation, which have real tangible benefits for biodiversity on a small scale.
Have you tried no-till agriculture? We're finding great satisfaction and success with it, and a lot of excellent information from Charles Dowding [1] — with lots of really detailed text and videos of how he manages his organic farm, showing those key details that are so often assumed or glossed over.
Of course mentioned in the article, the Xerces Society has many excellent resources to help the pollinators and other key insects [2] — good info for everyone.
Always good to see people having a clue about sustaining nature and doing something about it — so many are just oblivious and it will literally kill us all.
except crows. somehow crows endure.
I was floored.
When I explained, "We go out of our way to create insect habitat in our yard," his smile twitched and he realized he had no way of closing the sale.
But I'm simply amazed such practices are legal. "Hey! How about we spray a neurotoxin all over your yard? I'm sure that won't cause any unforeseen problems."
HOA's are the worst way of making sure people don't treat their property like shit. Better ways include: fostering a sense of community. Communicating with your neighbors. And finally, minding your own damned business.
Look, I loathe HOA's as much as the next person but this doesn't pass the Chesterton's Fence test. If your alternative doesn't handle the case of an uncooperative antagonistic neighbor then it won't at all be persuasive to someone is pro-HOA. "Just stop caring about the problem that HOA's were established to solve" only sounds good to people who arlready agree with you.
If the homeowner having rights is a problem, I suppose an HOA solves for that, otherwise I don't understand why the pro-HOA view need to be privileged at all.
HOAs have a ton of "power" and it's why subreddits like https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckHOA/ exist.
(I filed a police report, but folks don't seem to take it seriously.)
I'm thankful that aside from that, the number of spammy people in or around my home has Markedly decreased lately, but not as much as I'd like.
Edit: They might not have been Canadian, so edited "non-US".
If they're here, authorized, it shouldn't matter where they're from if there is not a language barrier.
My daughter saw some last night for the first time in quite a while. There were less than a dozen in a quarter acre area. She’s 19 and has noticed the difference.
(Same with Monarch butterflies albeit on a longer timescale)
I didn't see them as much when I lived in a city, but I don't know how much of that was light pollution, it's very difficult where I am to get out someplace where you could see the Milky Way without a car, and when I would I'd see a lot but "swarm" isn't the word I'd use. More like pixels blinking in a weird pattern.
They're definitely overall decreasing in numbers, though. 25 years ago was particularly big, but we still had fireflies every year after that. The last few years, I've found it pretty rare to see a firefly at all.
Interesting theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_available_potential...
Lightning flash rate May 4, 1995 - December 31, 2013
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85600/global-lightn...
Global lightning strikes from January 1998 to April 2015 from the NASA/MSFC Lightning Imaging Sensor on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite.
https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/lightning/images/browse/mission....
I'm living in an area which is pretty much in a dead zone on these graphs and have seen at least some lightning each year. Admittedly, most years only have pretty small bolts but that's a different story
- Someone who is indoors for the most lightning-active hours can easily bring their chance of seeing lightning way down [0]
- If you live in a dead zone, you can see 2+ orders of magnitude less lightning per year [0 and 1]
- People vary a lot in how much time they spend outdoors. Some people spend a half an hour outdoors each day, some spend five; there's another order of magnitude.
- If you live in a city or a valley, you often have a far more limited view as opposed to someone on a hill or flat land. If you live on the lower floors of an apartment building in a city, for example, you may only see the rest of your block, versus others that can see several square miles.
Just those four factors together and you've got a plausible several order of magnitude difference in how much lightning people see. I think it's totally possible there's a good chunk of the population that's never seen it.
[0] https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/4967/are-li...
[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85600/global-lightn... (also referenced in gp)
Wait are you calling a swarm of them a "lightning storm"? I thought pretty much everyplace gets lightning[1]
We have fireflies (or lightning bugs) in the back yard, too. I remember there being a lot more of them when I was a child, though.
Likewise, you learn something new every day :-)
- a swarm of fireflies (aka "lightning bugs")
- a storm with thunder and lightning
Thanks for this, descriptions like this help a lot more than raw stats, I had to hear a few sources of info say basically this before I grok-d it.
(I'll have to look into when they're supposed to come back, they're native to my area.)
Without predators (snakes, foxes, coyotes, owls, ...) managing rodent populations, numbers of infected ticks rise significantly.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5543215/
https://eu.thetimesherald.com/story/sports/2017/08/17/eckert...
"Nervous mice tend to stay home. Mice that stay home don’t run into ticks, don’t provide food for the next generation of ticks and don’t become infected with Lyme disease. Areas with the most predator activity had almost the same number of mice as areas without predators, but had one-fifth as many ticks and one-eighth as many infected ticks."
>Without predators (snakes, foxes, coyotes, owls, ...) managing rodent populations, numbers of infected ticks rise significantly.
One of my old townships used to pay a guy with a silenced rifle to come kill the dear once in a while, because each township banned hunting but there were wooded areas dotting throughout where deer would breed and breed then eventually run into traffic and kill people, then wander off to heal and then emerge angrier.
At least turkeys just stop in the middle of the road then try to bite you if you get out and try to shoo them.
(Shoo, no t. As in get out, shine a flashlight and yell, then the thing charges you as some Karen whines from her porch that you're disturbing wildlife on the way to the mall.)
My firefly stories are from the late-70s and early-80s, on the south side of Chicago, as urban as you can possibly be, and every summer night all the kids would be outside catching fireflies and letting them go. I live on the same sort of a street now, still in Chicago, and I can't remember the last time I saw a firefly.
edit: my surroundings haven't gotten brighter. When I was a kid, there was literally a Sears a block away. Lousy with fireflies.
They are peaking this week https://www.nps.gov/grsm/learn/nature/fireflies.htm
That's a fair point!
But did people know that it's specifically known for the fireflies? :-)
(I'd expect most people look at a list of the most visited and pick based on things like cost and drivability and adjacent issues, like costs of mosquito nets, but I can understand if it's literally just "yeah, in natural parks there's lots of nature, why does this suprise dontbenebby?")
Makes sense. The woo woo people get obsessed with GMOs etc when the real issue is monoculture paired with excessive chemicals to keep the monoculture from being eaten up rather than several varieties of... whatever... that each may resist different types of bugs.
(Though to be fair, I've never been to Georgia, just talked about it with folks who have.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Genetically_modifie...
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/eint/22/5/ei-d-17...
> “They prefer longer grass and they like to be in the leaf litter from the leaves that have fallen from last year,” Edwards said, “That will make a much better firefly habitat.”
Unfortunately in Long Island this would also make the ideal tick habitat. It's not worth the trade-off for residential property!
If you have a half acre backyard and only play in the 2/3 closest to your house, mow that grass and keep it neat, but let the other 1/3 go wild and/or install habitat-building plantings.
Small steps.
Used to be, every creekbed was a river of moving lights.
Now we're like, "ooh! I saw a firefly!"
Anyway, it turns out that swallowtail caterpillars love fennel. Each fall I collect fennel branches with caterpillars on them and keep them in a mesh canvas container in the garage. They form their chrysalis and seemingly go into suspended animation from about October until late May / June of the next year when they emerge as butterflies.
I collected 11 of them last fall, and there were still more when I had run out of room in the container. That's from a a small 2x2' square, so imagine what an entire field of fennel could do!
I also end up with a decent amount of leaf litter in my yard over the winter because of a large pin-oak which drops its leaves much later than the rest of the trees.
The fireflies really are spectacular.
(a very cruel and bad taste joke)
Have they been outside in the summer, in the midwest? In the mid-1990s you could nearly read a book by the light of lightning bugs. Now's nearly dark.
the good news is that it can still be partially reversed, if humanity acts quickly.
So we're fucked then.
Anecdota, but.
One in three firefly species in North America may be at risk of extinction, according to a study by the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
The title of that paper (https://xerces.org/press/firefly-species-at-risk) is “One in Three North American Firefly Species Assessed May Be at Risk of Extinction”, so I think that’s not a misinterpretation from my side.
Map showing which term (or both) are used across the United States:
https://homegrown.extension.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021...
[1] The above is a very local reference to a very well known Archer meme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyLWrKh2fB0
(I had a coauthor who'd make sweeping proclamations like "we do not use the word 'seminal paper' in this laboratory around the time they had to stop calling it ISIS on the show... due to the rise of ISIS, which, according to Wikipedia is " a Salafi jihadist group and former unrecognised proto-state"[1], but I'm not an expert on... natsec stuff.
Also, too much caffeine and no weed, so all I can do is amp up, then wait.
(I looked into MMJ, but the dispensaries are pretty unprofessional, it's why I think it should be recreational, they still act like cartel members.)
Lightning bugs in florida, fireflies in the north. At least in my experience.
There are also worms that glow.
What's the two species?
As someone who grew up in the northeast I called them lightning bugs as a kid.
Lighting bugs mostly in 412 as well
(Am I East Coast? Appalachian? Midwest? Mid atlantic? I've started just saying 412 rather than get hung up on semantics)
Duck duck grey duck?. I normally strive for civility online, but I think you're lying and challenge you to a duel.
To be clear, I'm joking about the duel, but seriously: who the heck says "duck duck grey"?
Earlier today someone asked in another thread on this site if I had had too much coffee -- the REAL issue is that I'm out of weed so I can't ramp down from my flow state[-1], and it's been my experience in STEM that nothing is taboo if the context is romantic. (It really grinds my gears that there seem to be no limits to the fun some people will have at others' expense.[0])
Reminds me of when someone claimed I "press stalked" them when all I did was look up their address before going over to... uh... "date" them, because I wanted to check they weren't just luring me out of my safe house to kill me, and every search engine I tried turned up basically no hits on that phrasal verb[1].
The difference is I tend to do it all under one nym, while others hide their inanity[2].
Anyways, in all seriousness: is Duck Duck Grey real? Or some virtual snipe hunt[3] you made up like the type they'd send Boy Scouts like me on in the 2000s just before the organization went bankrupt? :-)
[-1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Challenges_t...
[0] Die Schule war im Sommer so lange aus, der CFAA-Timer abgelaufen, und ich spreche immer noch kein Französisch :-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb
[2] Note the lack of an S if you want to pick apart my phrasing here, in this context. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/inane#Italian
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snipe_hunt#Noun
Edit: Still re-learning the formatting, and trying to look at cheat sheets less, edited to make the citations not be all on one line.
> Another way to help, he said, is to planting trees and native grasses, and to allow log and leaf litter to accumulate.
> “They prefer longer grass and they like to be in the leaf litter from the leaves that have fallen from last year” …
edit: Here's some that my daughter captured. Don't worry, we released them! https://i.imgur.com/1ol4d6C.mp4
He didn't know, at the time, that they were extremely rare starting somewhere west of the Mississippi river.
I remember in the 90s, you'd be walking home and every lawn pretty much had signs to not go on the grass or you'd get a chemical rash/burn and have to go to the township hospital. (After being chewed out by a series of Moms for being dumb and/or rude.)
Mine family was one of the few that didn't, but mine was the parent that got cancer, it's one of the reasons I believe in universal healthcare.
Use red outdoor lights instead of white to prevent them from getting confused. Absolutely turn off those huge floodlights people seem to love keeping on all night.
I live in the Great Lakes region out in the country, and the need to clean my windshield and front license plate was a weekly requirement due to all the bug splatter from my daily commute into work. This need has plummeted in recent years.
Another observation: Fish Flys
They would be so thick, that I have seen snow shovels and once even a snow-plow used to clear them off the street! (I worked at a full-service gas station in my teen years, the snow shovel was necessary for that 1 week in May-June). You couldn't walk from a parking lot into a store without slipping from the sheer number that get crushed when you walk.
The insect apocalypse is already here, and we are fucked.
It's just a sample size of one, but by the time I got rid of my car, which I'd had through the twenty aughts, I no longer had to memorize which gas stations actually changed the windshield fluid.
Maybe that's why some people have more bugs: they're coming out of the windshield fluid tanks at dodgy petrol shops whose cleaner buckets are all full of rainwater. :-)
For context, I drove from Bloomington, Indiana to the Bay Area twice. First time a more northern route via Colorado, the second time a southern route through the ABQ area with a stopover at the Flamingo in Vegas, since at the time they had a valet and REALLY reasonable rooms, but I wouldn't repeat that even if they kept those amenities -- driving within Las Vegas was the scariest experience of my life. Just trying to turn right out of a gas station near the strip after having taken my tank up to full was nerve wracking.
I felt safer on the 101 where I could let people overtake me and put the cruise control at 10 above the speed limit and listen to the audiobooks I had burned onto five MP3 CDs in a 5 disc changer.
But very rarely did I encounter that stereotypical "SPLAT" of a bug, let alone so many I had to clean the windshield... the issue was more dust and grime.
I also remember keeping a squeegee in the car to remove "bug paste" from the windshield after the wipers couldn't handle any more bug guts.
They also mentioned their license plate. It's something I have observed as well - the great bug decline or die off. It speaks to food web being insecure.
Keep the keycard from a motel around, not only can you use them to open many poorly designed doors without breaking your actual credit card[0], they're great for scraping crap like that off windshields.
Just heat up water in the microwave (being sure to poke the thing with a wooden chopstick or something in case it explodes, though 30-60s should just make it extremely warm[1]) then dump it right on there, then scrape that crap off and use napkins from McDonald's or whatever to get the mess off.
[0] I won't detail how - I taught someone how to do this to avoid lockout fees freshmen year, he allegedly broke into some woman's room to "prank" her who he was NOT friends with, then I had to sit through a dressing down by res life as the RAs continued to do pretty much the same thing, repeatedly, but to look for liquor rather than invent a cute reason to only "prank" the hotties from the soccer team. (Even autistic hackers notice when your invasions of privacy only involve people you want to... "date".)
[1] https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/home-busines...
Which the article calls out as meaning more bugs should be hitting the windshield, not fewer.
That said, I'm not sure I follow why that would cause more. I could see a stronger argument for it causing fewer.
Though I believe that there is likely an broad insect decline, for the bug splat anecdotes (remembering that the plural of anecdote is data) we also can't rule out that bugs are evolving based on selective pressure to avoid thoroughfares.
Wasn't there a post a year or so back on HN that basically said it's a measurement problem, not an actual insect apocalypse? I'll have to try to find that. Seems like I can never know what to believe any more.
I'd also want to know ... what does it matter? Are we seeing measurable knock-on effects from fewer insects? We should be, if they're critical to our ecosystems. If we're not, then... do we care? Seems like a legitimate question. Not that we want them to go extinct necessarily, but it could be worth tempering the panic.
Here is a news story: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/05/10/in-...
With so many insects missing, that is likely to have impacts on other animals and plants that would eventually impact humans. These creatures are food for other animals and pollinators for crop plants.
Beyond that, insect loss is an indicator that something is happening to our environment and the effects are probably not going to be positive. Treat this as a warning.
Edit: added statement about license plat vs airflow
How have bird strikes by cars changed over the last century? What if part of the issue is that we aren’t accounting for certain species starting to fly 8 feet higher?m because of the obvious evolutionary pressure?
But in any case, I really would like better metrics than license plates and windshields. It amounts to anecdotes masquerading as data, and I have to assume that there are scientists who've made more accurate measures over the years that are more objective.
I'm quite sure there's some real science going on, but it isn't as headline worthy.
A death by a thousands cut is the closest analogy. Complex systems don't collapse in a linear fashion. Their seemingly sudden collapse is only suprising beause of our inability to notice and connect the subtle changes.
Most wildlife indirectly eats insects as part of the food chain, and without insects most native plants will go extinct, so herbivores are mostly screwed too.
Without local plants you get other screwed up ecosystem issues. For instance, California's hills used to be green, not dead and yellow in the summer. That helps accelerate desertification.
If things continue down this road, we're completely fucked. Sometimes, I think nuking the politicians is the greenest path forward.
But, hey, it's election day here in California. Better go vote.
In the 1960s a number of people, at least one of whom had been elected to high office, who were improving this nation were assassinated, because several parties didn't like those improvements. Although some progress has been made since then, on many measures we've gone downhill. This process seems impervious to the popular vote. Perhaps it's time for another round of assassinations?
For most of the time of the event, you won't see any ill effects of a piano falling out of a building above your head, but if you wait to act until it starts crushing your hat, you are waaayy too late.
There are literal armies of scientists observing and working on this problem, and mountains of data, but you seem to think that your willful ignorance by reductive 'reasoning' is more relevant. There's far too much information to even begin to list here, but I'll suggest you start with the Xerces society [1] if you want to become informed.
Thanks for the personal attack. Instead of just bringing something more useful than windshield studies into the discussion. My complaint was that we keep hearing about windshields, when real data ought to exist. I'll take a look at your link, even if I'm inclined to suspect the bias of the source.
Here's some more data: first a famous German study showing 82% loss in nature preserves over just three decades [0], and then a meta-study of 166 studies (including the first one) [1].
Good luck and I'd suggest also looking into system dynamics, where even getting a clue of the complexity can lead you to avoid many pitfalls.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/germany-s-insects-ar...
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-study-gives-mo...