> People can help with firefly conservation by avoiding pesticides, [Marten Edwards, professor of biology at Muhlenberg College] said, and turning off outdoor lights, which confuse the bugs’ mating habits.
> 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” …
I worked with a guy from Germany about 20 years ago, before it was as easy find this sort of information online. I asked him if they had fireflies in Germany and he kind of scoffed and told me "Of course we have them over there!"
He didn't know, at the time, that they were extremely rare starting somewhere west of the Mississippi river.
I suppose it's west of the Mississippi, but it's a long ways west. I'd imagine it's around the 100th meridian then. That goes through the middle of Kansas and is where you start to expect to see more western species as you travel west past it and vice versa.
>People can help with firefly conservation by avoiding pesticides
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.
I've started seeing those signs again, but now they proudly proclaim that whatever they sprayed is "organic". (Same warnings about not getting near it, etc...)
And watch where you step! Females stay on the ground and males fly around to find them. There are very few females for each male, so if you capture or kill a firefly on the ground, that has an outsized effect on their reproduction.
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.
We moved to the country 25 years ago. First summer, driving home after dark, my wife said "What's all those lights?" About 1B fireflies were flashing over a hayfield.
"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.
> See, she grew up in the desert and thought stories about fireflies were in with fairies and elves.
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.
For ants. Extremely polluting for water. If you take the non-lawn product right next to it, the label says (European here): “Don’t spread on lawns, in places accessible to animals or children, in places where it will be drained to common water, only spread on the concrete in front of the house where the rain doesn’t reach, in quantities (5g per meter)”. And they give you a 2kg bottle. So I guess the lawn product is quite bad too, albeit slightly better.
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.
In the northeast many people are terrified of ticks, and they go scorched earth genocide trying to keep them away with neurotoxins.
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.
We have a large lawn around our house and from spring to fall the “pest pressure” (for lack of a better term) is intense. All kinds of beetles, ants, cockroaches, spiders, mosquitos and other flying bugs constantly get in our house and make it almost impossible to enjoy the outdoors. I have thought about trying to poison but it somehow seems wrong, plus I’m concerned about our herb garden.
Diatomaceous earth works very well for the crawling insects. Not so much for the ones that fly, of course.
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.
They actually have these confluence events where they mate and likely this is what you saw (if the counts were that high). I've seen their numbers wax and wane in my yard and beyond. That said, I don't denounce the research; just feel that these bugs don't always have the same population size year over year that someone could casually notice their decline.
I still see them every year. The absolute number seems to wax and wane, but I think their peak is pretty short, like a day or two, so if you don’t time it juuuuuust right, you aren’t going to see as much.
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.
Anecdotally I have seen a huge decrease in firefly's here in SE Michigan over the last few years. Five or so years ago you'd see hundreds of them while driving through the farm fields or sitting in your backyard enjoying a summer brewski. Last few years I hardly recall seeing any of them anywhere.
Same story in Ohio. Used to be able to drive along pastures and see thousands of fireflies.
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 wonder if the many polar vortexes in 2014, (2015/2017?) have reduced insect populations substantially. I remember that foxes were frozen in fields in Columbus during 2014.
The polar vortex is a symptom of the weakening of the jetstream, thought to be occurring because of warming-driven melting of the arctic ice cap. Human-driven melting.
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.
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.
Thanks for the pointer, now my morning is shot as I dig through old diaries and photos rather than doing something productive.
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 sometimes wonder how long it would take insects to evolve an instinct to avoid places that smell of gasoline (if many of those who don't detect it get squashed on a windshield). Of course I'm not denying the decrease in insect populations, which has been observed independently in many ways.
> I do not doubt this at all, but I also have to imagine that vehicles are more aerodynamic than they were a decade ago.
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.
Also, according to the Wiki article that cainxinth mentioned, more aerodynamic vehicles are apparently worse for flying insects. It seems somewhat counter-intuitive, but perhaps the more boxy vehicles push the insects away before they can be crushed.
>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.
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".)
I can't attest to their results but the producers of the super-aerodynamic aptera claim that almost no bugs wind up on the aptera as compared to their chase car, because the bugs wind up unharmed through the slipstream.
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.
My Tesla is plastered with bugs any time I leave Chicago. I don’t doubt the insect populations are falling, but I don’t relate to all of these clean car claims. It must vary a lot within the Great Lakes region.
I think insect variety in that case is restricted to a few species that keep thriving due to the sudden lack of predators. Like that brown marmorated stink bug that's killing the crops.
Yeah, after hand scrubbing the "grill" of my car several times this year (the concave plastic bit that replaces a grill on lower-end Teslas), it definitely seems like a lot of flies, but I'm no entomologist.
That stink bug, along with the spotted lantern fly, were invasive species from Asia which were first discovered in the USA --- in Allentown Pennsylvania! That's right, the same place referenced in the article.
> The insect apocalypse is already here, and we are fucked.
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.
There was an article a few months ago using measurements of impacts to license plates and it found a real drop of 60% in insect populations. The license plate is place to measure as it is not really affected by the airflow changes that some people suggest are the reason we see fewer impact.
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
Is it possible that it is a redistribution of the insect population to have more walkers than flyers or maybe even flying insects have learned how to avoid vehicles?
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?
I actually wouldn't be surprised at all if we've improved airflow relative to license plates, as well. The whole push to increase fuel economy means figuring out how to get air not to hit anything head-on, which includes bumpers and license plates.
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.
Yes historically we're very good at evaluating which ecological changes will have impactful second-order effects. No reason at all to break our pattern of confidently declaring that it seems fine.
If we can't identify any second order effects, it calls into question the validity of the original claim, though. I'm not too impressed by talk of windshield bug splatter count, because it smells a lot like folk 'science' and not real data. A lack of second order effects reinforces that suspicion.
I'm quite sure there's some real science going on, but it isn't as headline worthy.
The scientific evidence for insect population collapse is strong, but the consequences to the rest of the ecosystem can remain subtle for a long time, until they are not.
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.
Off the top of my head, we've been seeing crop failures due to lack of pollnators, and also bird population collapses in recent years.
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?
If you wait until the damaging effects of the collapse are already substantially affecting us, it is waaay too late by then.
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.
> but you seem to think that your willful ignorance by reductive 'reasoning' is more relevant
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.
Not meaning to be personal, but reductionist approaches are too often a way for brains to make bad assessments and decisions. Although reductionism has the benefit of being "efficient" and reducing cognitive load required to find a conclusion, it is often like the hapless drunk looking for his key under the streetlight instead of where he most likely lost it. Also unimpressive are arguments based on casual encounter with the issues that armies of scientists must have missed some One_Thing, and these arguments are often used in anti-science advocacy, so maybe I've got too little patience for that sort of thing.
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.
I wonder if firefly broods are on multi-year cycles like cicadas. Like others in this thread have said, I've seen huge firefly, erh, "blooms", 25 and 15 years ago. After the first one, and then subsequent years of not seeing such huge numbers, I thought I'd never see another one again. Unfortunately, I didn't have any chance to be out in some random field in Pennsylvania 5 years ago.
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.
I just moved to north Georgia recently, and I've never seen so many fireflies in my life - thousands of them. But we don't use pesticides, and I don't think my nearby neighbors do either. We also keep a good bit of grass pretty long most of the time.
Can you explain this link a little further? It looks like there's so many fireflies at this national park that they have to grant access via lottery? That's amazing, I'm on the east coast and would drive to something like this. Is it really as awesome as I'm imagining?
Well, GSNP is the most heavily visited National Park in the US, so that's mostly it. There's really nothing special about this place in particular though. The whole area is lit up right now.
>Well, GSNP is the most heavily visited National Park in the US
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.)
>In 2015, 89% of corn, 94% of soybeans, and 89% of cotton produced in the United States were from strains that were genetically modified to be herbicide-tolerant - including but not limited to glyphosate.
Good to see you moved to Georgia. We did about 20 years ago. Biggest difference I have seen lately in the tech scene is there are a lot more jobs outside of Atlanta. The salary/cost of living cannot be beaten (lived in MT, AZ, ID, SD prior to GA).
This has certainly been my anecdotal observation as well. As with other flying interests. Another eventual loss from our world. This won’t be the last.
(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.
There's this beetle that glows greenish. From 2 panels on its abdomen. And this other, much squishier, beetle that glows yellowish. From basically it's whole backend. So that's 2, whatever you call them.
No, you're wrong. There are many, many species of beetles (thousands) that are called lightning bugs/fireflies. The terms are interchangeable, as they refer to any species in the entire family.
If it glows and it's a bug that flies, it's a lightning bug/firefly interchangeably where I grew up. I don't care if it has 8 legs, 6 legs, 3 body parts, or whatever. If it blinks in the dark and I could run around and catch it, maybe sometimes squish it and rub the glowy stuff on like war paint, then that's all that mattered. You sciencey types that like to argue on the interwebs are just weird no fun having fuddyduddies. =)
>Real arguments occur in the realm of duck duck grey duck
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? :-)
The article mentions planting natives and leaving leaf litter for the insects to nest in. Anecdotally, that works extremely well. My neighbor always leaves his leaves under the trees (gums), and I'd noticed his yard always has a prolific firefly population. Two years ago, after I started to get interested in native plants, I started doing the same thing, and this year for the first time ever I have lightning bugs as well!
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.
Yup, small conservations efforts can make a real difference.
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.
The farm we purchased 6+ years ago is just starting to see fireflies and bats come back. We look at dusk visible bats to gauge our bug population. We stopped spraying and are allowing fields to go back to a mixture of natives and grasses. Also started mowing strips instead of bush hogging the whole field during the summer to give shelter to animals and insects. The biggest impact we have seen is that we have more of a "bug balance". The first two years we were here the garden plants were destroyed by pests. Now we have about a 20% reduction in garden production. We do not spray or fertilize. We have also discontinued the previous owner's habit of putting chicken litter (from commercial poultry facilities) on our hay and grazing fields. We have not been able to measure that effect yet.
Excellent to hear how you are bringing back the native grasses and insects! In what part of the world are you?
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.
We have on a limited scale...honestly grass growth has been a problem. With corn...works fine. With bush beans the grass grows too much and we are forced to weedeat/cut etc. since we can't put animals in with it. Squash we got a decent first and second crop but a third (which is pushing it anyway) had issues with a lot of rain and too much grass growth which caused mold. With pumpkins we have had better luck using a tine plow and planting between the grass furrows then moving the pumpkins onto the dirt as they mature. The biggest issue we have had is an over abundance of grass with no till since we don't spray a burn down on any of our cover crops.
I was nearly 40 years old before I saw fireflies for the first time. I was sent back east to Washington DC for a conference. One evening I was wandering near one of the monuments when these tiny points of light started lighting up. I couldn’t figure out what they were until I got close enough and realized they were insects. That was also the trip where I first saw lightning, so it was a very enlightening trip ;-) My children still have never seen fireflies (or lightning), so I hope they stick around long enough till we can go east someday and see them.
One of the main predictors is convective available potential energy, or the integrated amount of work that the upward (positive) buoyancy force would perform on a given mass of air (called an air parcel) if it rose vertically through the entire atmosphere
Global lightning strikes from January 1998 to April 2015 from the NASA/MSFC Lightning Imaging Sensor on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite.
It looks pretty unlikely for a person anywhere to go 40 years without witnessing lightning from looking at these visualizations, honestly.
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
Born and grew up on Oahu and moved to the mainland when I was a teen. Can definitely say that while I saw bright flashes of light from lightning during hurricane season I never actually saw the bolts of lightning until moving away from Hawaii.
It just takes a few factors to bring someone's chances way down. For example:
- 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.
Can anyone explain in simple terms why it seems that it occurs relatively frequently in the centers of continents and infrequently in the middle of the ocean?
Dry air is a good insulator so larger charge differentials can occur. Wet air isn't as good an insulator so charge doesn't build up. That is also why Lightning tends to happen during rain storms, the insulator breaks down and allows the charge to flow.
Maybe we don’t hand the warm cold transition? I also heard it has something to do with our clouds are always low and warm instead of high and cold, which apparently has something to do with making lightning. I really don’t know the reason our region doesn’t have lightning.
It's never occurred to me that there are places that don't get lightning storms. I'm guessing that also means you've never had the joy of getting your garden or car paint ruined by hail?
it's like rain. a rain storm. monday sunny skies. tuesday light rain. wednesday it rains all day - we call that a rain storm. thursday a rain storm with lightning? we call that a thunderstorm (or less commonly lightning storm): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderstorm
It was a very weird experience moving to the West Coast. One day there was some thunder off in the distance and I realized I hadn’t heard it in 6-7 months. Didn’t even know I was missing it.
Lightning happens all over but it is relatively rare on the US west coast, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. We had an actual thunderstorm in the fall of 2019 and everyone was talking about it for a couple of days after, it was so noteworthy.
The last time we saw lightning in the Willamette Valley of Oregon there were multiple posts on the local reddit asking what the flashing light in the sky was. People thought it might be a gas explosion or aircraft.
Wow, that's just mindblowing to me. Do they also point at the sun and ask if it a god in a chariot of fire? Clearly asked in jest, but that's just how strange hearing about people not having the fortune of seeing lightning on a regular basis. (I'm clearly a fan of lightning, and have a collection of photos I've captured as a hobby)
> Lightning happens all over but it is relatively rare on the US west coast, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. We had an actual thunderstorm in the fall of 2019 and everyone was talking about it for a couple of days after, it was so noteworthy.
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.
We get hail, but it has never been bigger than about 1/8 inch. Our climate just doesn’t have the right conditions to form lightning. Hail, sleet, snow, rain all still work properly.
I'm in the planning/permitting phase of building a greenhouse and an entomologist friend has agreed to help me try and raise some of fireflies. They are native to my area, but only locals over the age of 50 remember seeing them.
I get a lot of fireflies in my backyard. I have a Trumpet vine that they like to get it on on. I tried to film some firefly sex with mixed results. Can someone recommend a lens for m4/3 thats good in low light and good for macro.
That and butterflies have gone from ho-hum because you're guaranteed to see hundreds every year even if you don't try, to "holy shit, I see one, everybody come look!"
My daughter wanted to plant her own garden outside, so I made a 2x2' box for her to plant a few things in. I specifically made it small so that she could easily weed it and whatnot. She planted fennel in there, and boy did it take off. It escaped the box and now I find little sprouts of it everywhere and it smells like Italian sausage whenever I cut the grass.
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!
In my experience, it's been declining for decades. I moved to Oklahoma in the 90s, expecting to see fireflies. I saw ... one? Two? And that was it. I didn't see any significant number of fireflies until a later visit to West Virginia. But the way my grandparents used to talk about it, Oklahoma was teeming with fireflies during their youth.
Fireflies need humidity (which is why you don't see any in the American West) and Oklahoma sits right on the semi-permanent atmospheric boundary that divides the humid east from the dry west. This central dry line has shifted eastward due to climate change, taking the fireflies with it.
When I was a kid, firefly was very common in our area. We use to catch them and put on jars for night camping and let them go. Now you won't find a single one of them.
I don't know how anyone over the age of 30 could write this headline with the word "could." I know there's data behind it, and that we have to be careful not to assume things without the data but...
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.
by some authors, this decline is 3 orders of magnitude faster than what is inferred from fossil records of the last extinction event. global warming might increase that by an additional 2 orders of magnitude.
the good news is that it can still be partially reversed, if humanity acts quickly.
Humans act extremely quickly - in geological terms. That's part of the problem, of course. Unfortunately, it stands to reason that OP meant quickly in human terms.
Funny, the last two summers here at my rural place in southern Ontario (basically the midwest) there's been so many fireflies. We used to have them here and there, but never like this.
I’m not claiming your conclusion is incorrect, but predator-prey systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka–Volterra_equations) can have long stretches of population decrease. A measured decrease, even a huge one lasting decades, need not be a a long term decline.
This isn’t a simple two-species system. If insect population collapse were to cause a human population collapse, I think the number of cars (and wind turbines, and insecticides) would follow, possibly early enough to prevent full extinction of insects.
The title of this article may make it seem so, but IMHO, it is incorrect, and the main message of the article is
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.
Grew up in Southeast Virginia in the 60's. Fireflies galore. June bugs also. Not anymore - haven't seen them in 40 years. Seems to me it coincided with aerial spraying for mosquitos in the area. There are still plenty of mosquitos however:)
Anecdote but 2020 summer (covid summer) there were tons of fireflies in Boston. A lot more so than normal. I don't know how it was 10+ years ago though...
Just echoing what's already been said: on my parents' small Virginia farm growing up during the 90s, fields of fireflies all summer long. Now, I'm lucky to see one or two when I visit. Same story with frogs, toads, snakes, bats, etc.
> 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,” 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!
You can have both long grasses that establish and preserve natural habitats and also have places for humans and their companions to walk and play.
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.
I haven't seen June bugs since I was a child growing up in Wisconsin, about 20 years ago. They were never my favorite critter, but I am still troubled by their disappearance.
My family discovered recently that we have synchronous fireflies in our "back 40" (not really 40 acres, but a nice chunk of undeveloped land). They only go for a few weeks, but when they do, it's like someone threw Christmas tree lights all over the forest floor. Thousands of lights blinking at the exact same millisecond. Utterly amazing that such tiny organisms can synchronize over such a large area. We're doing our part to try to keep it habitable for them.
I don't think that's relevant to this article, unless you consider fireflies light pollution.
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.
That there were fireflies all over the brightly lit urban area, confused and unable to mate, is not inconsistent with the notion that man-made lights are hurting fireflies.
We had them until year-before-last when the house diagonally across from us hired "Mosquito Joe" poison-spraying service. They didn't disappear with the arrival of LEDs about 5 years ago.
In my corner of Michigan we seem to have them now while we didn't when I was a kid. Folk wisdom is that this is due to the mosquito control trucks no longer using DEET, but I have no idea if that's true. This is in a city obviously.
Also in Michigan, and my perception is the same. I don't remember seeing them at all in my area (fairly rural exurbs) growing up. Camping in Ohio and seeing them is a vivid memory of my childhood. Now, as an adult in more or less the same area (though much closer to the city), I see them all the time in my yard.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] thread> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
[1] https://xerces.org/
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...
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
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis_(disambiguation)
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.
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.
[1] https://charlesdowding.co.uk/
[2] https://xerces.org/
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_lightning
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.)
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!
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/eint/22/5/ei-d-17...
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.
except crows. somehow crows endure.
(a very cruel and bad taste joke)
> “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.
https://www.darksky.org/
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.