Lightning bugs!!

Bioluminescence is actual magic. I will take no calls on this matter.

Eh, what fireflies can do is kinda the base level of the bioluminescence 'skill' of the evolutionary tech tree.

https://gizmodo.com/glowing-deep-sea-squid-have-a-complex-form-of-communica-1842472534

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DE89YY7zCio

Humboldt squid skin is bioluminiscent, but roughly akin to a flexible lcd or oled screen, with many different 'pixels' capable of being set specifically.

They likely have the ability to communicate by basically displaying different patterns of different colors and brightnesses and translucency, sorta like a human walking around with a sandwich board made of lcd screens, which they can control with a phone app.

They may very well have an entire language they can convey via sequenced or at least specific patterns.

Note: No clue if you can actually trace bioluminescence in fireflies and certain cephalopods to the same common ancestor or if its completely different, independent evolutionary occurances, but my point is there are certainly more and less complex and utility granting forms of bioluminescence.
"I cast 200 μg Luciferin."

[Dice noises]

"Nat 15. Your abdomen glows and dims slowly and rhythmically."
- Pathfinder 2e literally has bioluminescence bombs that's just jarred firefly juice that's secreted by humanoid fey that resemble the bugs
Nah, it legit is, though. Just because someone or most someones understand how something happens doesn't mean it isn't magic anymore. It just means that we have a hard magic system. We understand our magic so well that we've stopped seeing it as magical, but if you take a step back and take a look at the big picture it becomes clear that the world is magical, and everything around us is this amazing, often confusing, incredible tapestry of Wonder and awe. The world has just ground us down so much that we feel like wonder is strictly for children, that we're not allowed to feel wonder anymore. Embrace the magic. Even if you know how it works.
- Sometimes I stop to think about the fact that a tiny electrical impulse in my brain can cause my fingers to move and press buttons on my keyboard, which in turn causes larger, but still small electrical impulses to trigger a shiny rock we trapped lightning in to do an immense number of calculations, to send a stream of further impulses to my network router, which sends them on to another router, and another, and on and on, each step might go via a wire, or radio, or the flashing of a tiny light, or even bounce off of a satellite in space and back to another router, until it eventually finds it's way to a server, which does huge numbers of further calculations, then sends impulses back to me, and also to other servers, via just as remarkable a route, which in turn send impulses down wires and optical fibres and bouncing off of satellites until one of those streams of impulses gets to your router, where it gets sent on to your shiny lightning rock, which performs many calculations and causes a pattern of light and dark dots to appear in front of you, which cause a series of tiny electrical impulses in your brain, that you perceive have meaning.
  
  The natural world is filled with magic and wonder, but this is a magic we designed and built ourselves.
Spelling it without help is also magic, so I hear ya.
Magic exists but we call it science
- Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
Fuckin bio-lights how do they work
Hell ya. Real magic is the feelings we felt along the way. Swimming in bioluminescent waters is one of my favorite life experiences
Humans are bioluminescent, too! But it's too dim for anything to actually be able to see, so it's no fun.
- Is that "article" trying to say we're exothermic and thus glow in the infrared?
- We also have stripes.
The definition of magic I go by is "affecting consciousness in accordance with will", and when you're going to watch fireflies with the thought in mind to appreciate them aesthetically, then yes, they are actual magic.

https://norse-mythology.org/concepts/magic/

Magic produces change by working directly with consciousness. Its effects often spill over into the physical world, but this occurs only indirectly. This is, in an important sense, the exact opposite of what modern science does. Science causes changes in the physical world in accordance with the “laws” of the physical world. Magic and science not only work by different means; they also work toward different ends, and, in fact, this difference in ends accounts for the difference in means. This is why practitioners of magic don’t conduct laboratory experiments, and why scientists don’t intone chants before altars inscribed with emotionally powerful symbols. The apologists for the conventions of our own age often claim that magic is a “primitive,” immature groping toward science, and now that science has arrived, magic is obsolete. But science and magic are different enterprises altogether. Neither can entirely supersede the other. Indeed, as will be discussed below, magic is as alive and well in the modern world as it’s ever been – it’s just been brilliantly disguised

We used to have so many of them when I was a kid. Their numbers are dwindling. 😭

Saw this just the other day here...
- I saw that the other day too. It's just that 35 years ago, everyone still raked their lawns. Same as 35 years before that.
- The less I maintain my yard the more lightning bugs we get.
  
  We do not maintain our back yard very well. I refuse to let these amazing insects disappear. We also seed for pollinators as well.
The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor's yards. I'm the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.

A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.
- I feel a little bad for the pest control guy that showed up at my house last spring. I majored in Biology, but did not graduate, my partner has their Masters in Biology and wrote their thesis on ecological damage from heavy metals.
  
  Yeah, my yard looks a little unmanaged, sure, you can see bugs all over the milkweed, that's intentional. My yard was visited by thousands of bees (and sadly) a dozen or so butterflies daily. Because we had the insects and native plants, we had lots of small birds, and becuase we had lots of small birds, we were lucky enough to have a local Cooper's Hawk as a regular visitor nearly every day.
  
  The guy offered to do indoor services for spiders and termites. I told him I don't have any of those because I have a bunch of basement centipedes. He said he could spray for those, and I was like "Why? They're harmless and they're the reason I don't have dangerous spiders and termites in the house".
I never lived anywhere near them, never seen a bioluminescent creature in my life despite my wish to do so.

But when I was about 6 years old, I have a weird memory of my parents driving out to the deep desert with me and we parked off some dirt road and my dad got out of the truck for maybe a half hour. My mom seemed nervous. I saw a green light at the base of a bush about 15 feet away from the vehicle, just a tiny little bright green light, solid color, middle of nowhere.

I asked my mom what it was and she said "it's a glowworm" and I asked if we could go look at it and she snapped "NO don't go outside!" and I was absolutely boggled what was going on. My dad came back, they drove out of there without a word. One of those life mysteries we all have tucked away in our memory banks. I'm pretty sure I wasn't dreaming, but it's getting back there in years, probably was early 80's now. (This was the Sonoran desert in winter, there are no "glow worms" out there, and no bugs generally coming out in the cold anyway. I lived there for decades, there are no bioluminescent critters there.)

It brings me unimaginable sadness to know that my recently born nephew will grow up in such a region, when just a few years ago you could see hundreds of these guys in any given back yard

- I hate blankets of grass so much
- Leave your leaves in autumn!
We've been living at the same house for about a decade. We have a tiny tiny creek in our back yard with some unmowed area around it. Our yard is chemical free and we have tons of pollinators. We saw single digit numbers of lightning bugs for nearly the time we lived here. Never more than two a night and most nights none showed up.

The past few years we've seen an uptick. Not loads, but they seem to be making a small comeback. At least in our yard.
I lived most of my life in areas where fireflies were around, but they weren't the bioluminescent type,

The house I moved to about 5 years ago is in the woods and 3 months out of the year these guys buzz around my front yard and I've even helped a few out of the house.

They never fail to bring a smile to my face.
- First one of the year is always a treat. Then I remember how many there were as a kid and it makes me sad.
  
  Please, switch to red outdoor lights if possible, and if you can't do that, shade your outdoor lights so that it only illuminates specific areas. Fireflies are affected by light pollution.
  
  Also, don't rake your leaves, or if you do have to take, try to sequester them in an area on your property, (I'm currently using my leaves as "sunkill" for garden and flower beds.) fireflies lay eggs on leaf litter, if you dispose of the leaves, you dispose of the eggs.

Also, people are born every day, and some just go on with their lives never learning about random facts like these. Every day, someone is one of the lucky 10k.

Man, imagine seeing a field of fireflies IRL for the first time, if you had never heard of them before! That would be pretty mindblowing.
- I knew about them but didn't see them well into adulthood. It's underwhelming
This XKCD?

I grew up calling them lightning bugs, and I'm so excited to see a thread full of people calling them the same!

Fireflies is a much cooler name though.
In German, they're Glühwürmchen ("glow worms").
- Wait hold up, in Dutch we have glimwormen ("shimmer worms" ) but those don't fly! They're actual bioluminecent worms.
  
  Aren't German Glühwürmchen the same thing?
- Interesting, interesting. We call the female lightning bugs here glow worms because they are wingless, but today I'm learning that is not the case for all species!
  
  Also Glühwürmchen is a cute word.

You would not believe your eyes

When ten thousand fireflies
- You already messed up on the second sentence man, its ten million, not ten thousand

coming from australia, this is super real… we have such a unique set of animals and plants that it’s all just so normal to us, but then you travel overseas and everything is like what you see on tv and in movies

i’m mid 30s, and last year i saw snow falling for the first time in chicago… snow falling is beautiful, and to most of the world it’s just normal - to australians, it just never happens

Seeing how Australians react to kangaroos like they're just slightly more dangerous deer is so jarring
- To be fair, they mostly are just slightly more dangerous deer
- Deer will mostly run the hell away. Roos OTOH, sometimes you gotta punch back.
  
  (For those rare folk who haven't seen that video, he was getting it off his dog.)
I hope you get many beautiful snowfalls in your life yet
Snowfall is probably one of the best sensations in nature. It's just so calming and peaceful.

I know a girl in south carolina who wasn't from there; she saw lightning bugs for the first time there one summer and she started crying. I find that story very touching- its a reminder not to be blind to the beauty of the world, even if that beauty is so common that it's unremarkable.

I see beautiful and common things that people around just shoulder shrug about.

Saw a black bear mama with two cubs last month, a coyote dancing playfully the next week. This week the water lilies are starting to explode across the local swamp. In that same swamp are hundreds, if not 1,000+, endangered pitcher plants and common sundews. Even at work there are several species of songbird in the garden section and raptors patrol the skies.

My mom grew up in an area of California with no fireflies. When she was a teenager, she went on a cross-country trip with a friend. In the mountains of North Carolina, they were driving along at night when some bugs hit the windshield of their car. They didn't think much of it... until the bug guts started glowing. Then they screamed.

No fireflies where I live, but that doesn't mean my childhood was free of a beautiful insect swarm.

My area had a bad outbreak of cockchafers I got to enjoy.

And an equally beautiful name for that fine insect
I have never heard of that insect.
- Despite the name and status as a pest (they are literally European scarabs), I feel nostalgic whenever I see one. Farmers ruthlessly fought them, so there hasn't been a swarming event here in at least 20 years.

I grew up in the American southwest and I saw them for the first time last summer. I probably looked crazy to people, a guy in his late 20s taking pictures and videos of bugs along the road to send to my family, but I was genuinely mystified

I thought I was seeing spots on the edge of my vision or something before I realized what they were. I always thought they were constantly emitting light, not twinkling

Different areas have different lightning bugs too. The ones in southern ontario are not the same as the ones in the midwest US.

They have distinct blinking patterns as well. IIRC observing the pattern is one of the ways used to classify them.
- and colours!
- Except when it's a firefly pretending to be a different species of firefly.

Calvin trying to be a firefly

Growing up, they were indigenous where I lived. After I moved away, it was so surreal no not see random lights in the back yard during the summer nights.

these guys are great!

I was also blown away the first time I've seen bioluminescent bacteria on some strip algae...you would pass your finger by them and see the hidden binary encoded alien messages

Firefly: a lightning bug

Lightning bug: a firefly

Fire bug: an arsonist

Lightning fly: ??? The electric eel of the dragonfly world?

"Is that bat glowing?"

That's no bat. Run!"

[Electrical crackling sounds]

Is no one going to point out that it looks like Sauron's eye between the index and middle fingers?

Tried searching YouTube for "fireflies" to watch them in action. 99.9% of the results are music, podcasts and political channels using the term. Think I saw 2 videos of actual fireflies on the first page of results 😆

If you have Disney+ then there's a show called A Real Bugs Life and one of the episodes is mostly about fireflies (and atlas moths and staghorn beetles).

I saw a few lightning bugs in my yard last year. My life goal have them consistently in my yard. Good thing this dovetails nicely with my other life goals of getting butterflies, bumblebees and birds in my yards

Make sure not to bag and toss all the leaves in the fall - leave a bunch in a pile in the corner of your yard. Thats where they like to stay at night
- We got piles on my gardens which will get covered for composting in place for the rest of the year. Also our wildflower garden is pretty much untouched except a yearly mow to remove baby trees. So plenty of spots for bugs

Tumbler has one of the worst comment layouts...

One of the cool things about living in Ohio for a couple years, didn't exist in Texas where I was raised.

Also significantly fewer roaches. In my experience they're more common in the south due to the warmer weather
- Mayflys tho, that was something I hadn't even conceived of lol

Cocuyo is the name in Cuba 🥹

I have never seen one and I am very jealous :(

Yeah. I once even visited the US South, but it was the wrong time of year or area.

Ghibli even made a movie about them

Are actually that bright? Where I live they are very dim and green.

It's been more than 20 years since my wife moved to the west cost and she still laments the lack of fireflies. Where-as, whenever I've been out east, I'm caught off guard by them... then I start singing Roxanne.

You don't have to put on the gold light

We don't have any such things here in Darkonia.

OWW! Fucking coffee table!