I was pretty freaked out the first time I saw fireflies while stationed in the South. At first I thought I was hallucinating. Then I wondered if I was seeing aliens or something. Finally one got close to my face and I snatched it out of the air. When I opened my hand there was a little bug sitting there blinking, and I was amazed. They’re honestly the coolest creatures I’ve ever seen on this earth.
I haven’t seen any of these bad boys in probably over a decade. They used to be all over the place.
They like to live in piles of dead leaves. Between suburban neighborhoods having landscapers haul away yard waste and using pesticides to keep those lawns perfect, they have nowhere to live.
If you go to rural areas they’re still around.
We used to have thousands of these in my backyard as a kid every summer. Now I rarely see them. We’ve done a great job at destroying our ecosystems in record time. We’re so fucked
lightning bugs were cool.
Haven’t seen em in a while now that i think about it.
Because we killed them all. Pesticides, climate change, lawns… They’re dying out along with basically all bugs.
I have billions in my lawn. Just plant locals (guerilla style) and they’ll be back.
Their decline has been so sad. I moved somewhere with fireflies in 2007. The first year they were everywhere. The second year less so and they were completely gone by 2010. I always tried to leave longer grassy areas for them but they were just… gone. It was so so so sad. I didn’t grow up with them and that first summer was enchanted and magical.
I have great memories of walking down the road on a hot night with thousands of slowly blinking balls of light. The person who lives in that place now probably doesn’t even know that fireflies are supposed to be in the area.
Lightning bugs have a multi-year lifecycle that includes living in fallen leaf matter, hunting for other bugs, before emerging in like 2-3 years. So they need places that don’t haul away all of the fallen leaves/plant matter or use broad spectrum pesticides.
I’ve always kept all the leaves in rows along our fences for the lightning bugs to live in, which is also popular with the song birds hunting for bugs. That and don’t do the broad pesticide treatments.
It seems insane to me that Americans use pesticides on their own garden and lawn. Do you not walk on there? have your kids and pets play outside? What are you even trying to kill with the poison?
For us it’s fire ants. They’ll destroy your yard if you let them.
Throughout my millennial decades they’ve gone from indigenous to childhood memories :(.
We work so hard to destroy local plants to build artificial backyards, and now our parents don’t know why they don’t see them anymore :(
I’ve always called them fireflies growing up but it seems like that’s dependent on where you grew up
This content is not available in your country/region.
