Wildlife Watching Wednesday: Fireflies Light Up the Night
By: Tom Berg
Many of us grew up chasing fireflies in our yards during the summertime. They were fun to watch and even more fun to catch. These insects are also called lightning bugs, and both names are appropriate since these creatures have the ability to light up with their amazing internal light source. They appear in the evening right before dark and blink their internal light on and off as they fly around within a few feet of the ground.
Fireflies are actually beetles of the family Lampyridae, and there are more than 2,000 species of firefly on Earth. That’s pretty amazing. Most species can fly, but a few are flightless. Most of them also produce a luminous flash or light within their abdomen. The light produced by them is called bioluminescence, and it’s the result of a complex chemical reaction.
One of the interesting things about the bioluminescence of fireflies is that this light is a “cold light”, meaning the light does not generate heat like a flame or light bulb. If heat was generated, it would likely cook the poor firefly. Although most fireflies in the United States produce a yellow light, different species from around the world produce light of different colors, including green, greenish-yellow and even orange.
Most species of fireflies use their flashing light to attract mates during the warm weather months, and different species use different flash patterns to attract the right mates. You may see different flash patterns in your yard at night because there may actually be multiple different species of firefly living nearby. Who knew?
Besides attracting mates, the bioluminescence of fireflies is also a defensive mechanism which alerts predators to the fact that these glowing insects taste terrible. In fact, the bitter-tasting toxins in fireflies can be fatal to small predators like birds and frogs, so fireflies are usually pretty safe from most predators.
They can go about their normal routines of blinking and searching for mates without a care in the world!
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