Despite their luminescent glow, lightning bugs have remained a conservation mystery until relatively recently. Now researchers are relying o
Excerpt from this story from Audubon:
βI canβt tell you how many people come that are like, βI grew up seeing fireflies, and I donβt see as many now,β β says Matt Johnson, the centerβs director.
Candace Fallon, a conservation biologist at theΒ Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, had long heard similar concerns. But when she checked the literature in 2018, she found little to no information on firefly trends. In fact, there was no comprehensive population data for any of the 179 known firefly species in the United States.
Fallon and a team at theΒ International Union for Conservation of NatureΒ set out to determine how American fireflies are faring. In 2021 they published their findings, theΒ first list of conservation statusesΒ for U.S. fireflies. Of the 132 species they reviewed, more than half lacked enough data to conclude anything for certain. But among the species whose status was clear, the scientists found 20 to be threatened or near threatened.
Fireflies, which are actually bioluminescent beetles, face many of the same threats as birds. Habitat lossβespecially of wetlands, given the insects' preference for moist areasβis a major issue. (Indeed, the most threatened fireflies are the species that depend on only one type of landscape, such as the critically endangeredΒ Bethany Beach firefly, which primarily occupies freshwater wetlands between sand dunes along a 20-mile stretch of the Delaware coast.) Rising seas and extreme weather events drown coastal birds' nests as well as firefly habitat, while pesticides kill insect prey that both fireflies and birds rely onβand likely fireflies themselves. Light pollution, which can disorient nocturnal migratory birds and contribute to fatal building collisions, also disrupts lightning bugsβ ability to communicate: Flashing in a brightly lit environment is like trying to yell across a crowd.
To help fill critical knowledge gaps, researchers are turning toΒ community science. TheΒ Fireflyers International NetworkΒ collects dataΒ on iNaturalistΒ from all over the world, and in 2022 Fallon and the Xerces Society launched theΒ Firefly Atlas, where U.S. participants can share incidental observations and even conduct field surveys. These crowdsourced records can illuminate how species are trending in the face of threats.
In some parts of the country, community scientists are logging the first records of fireflies. In the West, the flashing beetles are such a rare sight that some people believe they are imaginary. βItβs like: unicorns, dragons, fireflies,β says Christy Bills, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Western fireflies have always been harder to find: They appear late at night, in small numbers, and in marshy areas where people donβt often hang out. So Bills and her partners at Brigham Young University started theΒ Western Firefly ProjectΒ to focus attention on them. Today its participants have spotted fireflies in 27 of 29 counties in Utah, where previously there had been only a few documented sightingsβand in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, so exciting to Bills that she likens the discoveries to finding gold.
