Lampyridology (FIREFLIES) aka Sparklebuttology Updated Encore with Sara Lewis

Let’s light up your life and butt. World-renowned firefly expert Dr. Sara Lewis of Tufts University gives us some updates to her 2021 episode, sharing her love of a bug that many think is merely mythological. Learn how these tiny animals illuminate the night, the dos and don’ts of firefly observation, how to take good firefly photos, femme fatales, pink glowworms, secret languages, artificial lights, what’s up with their population numbers, why Western states can chill out with their lightning bug envy, and how you can ensure the world stays aglow with these beloved bugs. Also: nuptial gifts, both human and lampyridological.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 0:42Alie Ward?

  Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It makes you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit mazdausa.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Your body has a lot going on. Sleep, stress, recovery. You would be surprised how connected it all is. Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that information together to help you see patterns across your sleep, and stress, activity, and more.

• 1:26Alie Ward?

  So you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at auraring.com. Wear your best life with Aura. Oh, hey, it's that key under the mat that somehow nobody finds and uses to steal all of your stuff. Hallie Ward. In this episode, it first aired in 2021, but it's summer and there has been a lot of discourse on fireflies lately. And this week, July 5th and 6th, marks World Firefly Day. So I reached out to this guest because I wanted to re-air this with some updates. And she said, I feel like we've accomplished a ton of firefly conservation in the past four years. And so we've cited some of the new studies and research and ways to volunteer with this creature because.

• 2:12Alie Ward?

  Let's roll the episode. We have fireflies for you, or do we have lightning bugs? We're gonna get into it. So these glowing friends, they're neither flies nor true bugs, rather beetles in the family Lamparidae. But as you will soon learn, this episode's name comes at an expert's behest. So she is a professor of biology at Tufts University in Boston. She did a TED Talk on these beloved little critters. She's the author of the information-packed and entertaining book, Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies. You may know her on Twitter under the handle @silentspark. And I was introduced to her through Eric Eaton, who was our WASP champion a few episodes back. And I jumped at the chance to talk to her,

• 2:54Alie Ward?

  crammed it in the schedule a day or two before my wedding earlier this month. And we will get to know her work. And just a sec, but super quick. Thank you to everyone at patreon.com/ologies for making this show possible for the four years we've been around and for submitting great questions every week. Thank you to everyone keeping ologies up in the charts by leaving us reviews. And each week I read a just-left one, and it's 2025 now. So thank you to S V G D Makes, who wrote, "I love ologies. It's one of the few podcasts I share with people time and time again. The only downside? You get smarter and start to question every source of fictional entertainment." S V G D Makes, "We're here to load up your brains. We're here to load up some flim-flam and, I guess, spoil the rest of entertainment." Sorry.

• 3:37Alie Ward?

  And thank you to everyone whose reviews I creepily read, literally all of them. Okay, onward. Sparkle Buttology. You're gonna learn the etymology in a minute. I'm not even gonna go there in the intro. But you will also get hip to how these animals light up, why they light up our hearts, their luminous sexy language, the best firefly photography accounts to follow, how to take your own pictures, do's and don'ts of firefly observation. Is it actually okay to put them in jars on your nightstands? Or are you a monster? Cobalt ghosts, pink glowworms, femme fatales of the firefly world? How their populations are doing? If artificial lights affect them? How to join conservation efforts?

• 4:21Alie Ward?

  Why Western states need not suffer from sparkle butt envy any longer with firefly scientist, evolutionary ecologist, researcher, conservation advocate, professor, author, and perhaps the world's first and only self-proclaimed sparkle buttologist, Dr. Sarah Lewis.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  My name is Sarah Lewis, and I use she/her. Let us dive.

• 5:07Alie Ward?

  Okay, great. Dr. Lewis, thank you so much for joining. Urology, is it lamparology? Would that be what it is?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  You know, this is really, really a hard decision. I spent a lot of time in the last day thinking about this. And so, I don't know, I don't like lamparology. I don't like that one at all. What about lightning bugology? Or, I don't know, like sparkle buttology?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  There's so many really great ones. You know, why use the family scientific name? It just doesn't seem right.

• 5:44Alie Ward?

  Sparkle buttology, it is.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Okay, I like that one, too. Good. We're agreed.

• 5:50Alie Ward?

  You are one of the world's most well-known firefly experts and scientists and enthusiasts. And can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with bugs in general? Have you always been pro-bug?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  So, um, yeah, you know, no, I haven't. In fact, I don't like every single insect. I... I'm completely, completely in love with fireflies. And I think that most people are. You know, I know a lot of people who don't really like insects. In fact, they have kind of, you know, entomophobia.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  So, what, we don't like bugs?

• 6:32Alie Ward?

  Honey, they don't like bugs.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  But I've really never met a single person who didn't like fireflies. So they're, you know, they're kind of unique in that way, right? Like even insect haters love fireflies. Of course, many people don't realize that fireflies are insects, so huh.

• 6:50Alie Ward?

  Yeah, what do you think they think they are? Fairies?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Magical fairies, yeah, absolutely. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sort of educate and advocate for fireflies on social media. And so one of the things I've noticed on Twitter is that there's a lot of people who don't actually think that fireflies exist. They think they're like something that's in children's stories. It's kind of like a myth. And yeah, there really aren't any fireflies as far as they're concerned. They just don't believe it.

• 7:19Alie Ward?

  I mean, I felt that way about huckleberries and then I found out they were a real food. It was like a huckleberry exists. So fireflies, I guess that's a first flim flam to debunk is that fireflies are nonexistent, but they're not fiction. They're real.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so many really cool myths to debunk about fireflies. I just love it, you know, it's like so much fun, right?

• 7:39Alie Ward?

  What other myths do you feel like people come at you to, to ask about?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so first, they are real, that's cool. And yeah, the other thing is that a lot of people think, you know, you've seen one firefly, you've seen them all. But there's actually a lot of different kinds of fireflies. And so, yeah, there's a tremendous diversity in terms of their behavior and their lifestyles and the kinds of things that they like to do, the kinds of things they like to eat. And so that's really cool. Like there's not just one kind of firefly. If you believe that fireflies are real, you might think there's just one. But there's, there's actually about, well, more than 2,000 different species of firefly. And it turns out we're discovering new ones all the time.

• 8:28Alie Ward?

  Ooh, that's cool. How, how big and how small do they get?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Hmm. So they can be pretty tiny, like you can still see them, uh, with your naked eyes, so not that tiny. And they can also get really big. A couple of years ago, I was in Malaysia and I had a chance to see these, they're kind of giant, flightless female fireflies. They're like, the females are like the size of your thumb.

• 8:54Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  A big thumb, right? So they're usually, and they don't have any wings. They actually, they kind of look wormish. And they are, they're pale and they're big and they're full of eggs and they crawl around on the ground. And the genus is Lampagera, and they're actually really cool because the males look like regular little fireflies. But the females are giant, much, much bigger than the males, and they are like putting all of their energy into reproduction. They don't bother flying around, like, you know, why bother? I'll just sit there, let the males come to me.

• 9:30Alie Ward?

  So some of these lady lightning bugs endemic to Asia would fill up your whole palm had you the chance to hold one. They are wingless, dense, pregnant, with a butt that blinks like a flickering neon sign, kind of like the sexy Jabba the Hutt of fireflies with a real flashy ass. Now, much different than the airborne field fairies that folks in North America might be used to. When did you first encounter them? Because I grew up in California, so I didn't see one until I was out of college when I went to New Jersey one summer. But when did you first encounter fireflies?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's funny. A lot of people have these like origin stories of like first seeing fireflies when they were kids and they just fell in love and they've been in love with fireflies ever since. It's like a, a childhood nostalgia thing for many people. I grew up in Connecticut, but I don't remember seeing fireflies until I was actually in school in North Carolina. And I was a marine biologist and I was waiting to go to the field in Belize where I was studying coral reef ecology and I was sitting out on my back porch and with my dog and it was like late afternoon and a thunderstorm was rolling in and so suddenly it like got darker

• 10:46Speaker 01

  and darker and darker and just before it started to rain, I noticed that all around us in the grass, there were these lights that were coming out of the grass and slowly rising up and they were like these silent sparks like embers coming out of the grass and just filling the air all around me. And it was like, whoa, what is going on here? That is the first time, honestly, I remember seeing fireflies. It was like, huh? This is amazing.

• 11:18Alie Ward?

  When did you sort of turn your sail from the marine studies back to land?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, it's been a kind of evolution of of interests and one of the great things about being in academia is that you have like you can kind of follow your curiosity. And that night, actually, my curiosity got sparked and I wanted to wonder like, what the heck is going on here? Like, who is flying? What are they flashing about? Who are they talking to? What are they saying? And so in my copious free time, I got to sort of investigate some of those questions and reach out to the to the firefly experts that I could find in the US and elsewhere and to start to put together, like, what do we know about fireflies? And what

• 12:09Speaker 01

  are the big sort of missing pieces? What don't we know? And where can I like contribute to trying to answer some of these questions? And so after I got my PhD.

• 12:20Alie Ward?

  Dr. Lewis got her PhD in coral reef ecology in 1984 from Duke University.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  In North Carolina, I moved to Massachusetts and started working on fireflies. And I don't want to say that I've worked continuously on fireflies, but a lot of the work that my students and I have done has been looking at the kind of intimate details of firefly sex lives.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  And courtship. And it's been really fascinating. We've been able to like discover all this, you know, really, really cool stuff.

• 12:57Alie Ward?

  Would you say that's primarily why they're flashing their Morse code? Is that pretty much booty calls, like in a literal sense?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. It is. And yeah, so it's subtle. And there are, you know, there's all kinds of innuendo in there. And if you're just looking at it from the gross point of view, it's like, yeah, they're just kind of flashing back and forth and trying to find mates. But really, they're actually trying to find like the best mates. And the females are really choosy, and the males are really competitive. And they're doing all this stuff. All of this information is being passed in this beautiful visual channel that people can actually see. So, you know, a lot of insects communicate on other kinds of channels, like, you know, smell, or sound, or ultrasound, different kinds of things

• 13:49Speaker 01

  that are a little bit harder to eavesdrop on. But fireflies are a beautiful thing, because all of this courtship exchange is going on in visual signals that are really, really easy for human beings to see, to record using electronic devices, and also to play back. And so one of the things that my students and I have been able to do is to eavesdrop on the courtship conversations of these different kinds of fireflies. And then to be able to play back, just to tweak the signals that males are giving a little bit, make them a little bit faster, make them a little bit longer, make them a little bit slower,

• 14:30Speaker 01

  and then play them back to female fireflies. And one of the great things about, this isn't true for all fireflies, but a whole lot of the fireflies in the US engage in a, we call it a courtship dialogue, so they talk back and forth. So the males are flying around, they're advertising their availability with this pretty stereotyped signal. And the females respond to these male signals if they like the male.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  If they don't like the male, they shut up.

• 14:59Alie Ward?

  She goes to you.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  They don't say anything at all. And so you can actually find out what a firefly female is thinking about a signal by just asking her. And so it's kind of like conducting an opinion poll, right? You say, or, you know, going to the eye doctor, you know, they put those lens things on you and they say, you know, is this better or is this better? How about this? Is this better or is this better? And you can do that to a female firefly and she will tell you, yeah, this is the signal that I like.

• 15:28Alie Ward?

  Wow, are you doing that with little like LED lights?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:32Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. So that's been kind of fun. And one of the things that we discovered is that female fireflies are really kind of choosy about who they respond to. If the female doesn't respond, of course, the male can't see her. It's dark. And so he won't be able to find her and mate. But if she does respond, there's like a whole frenzy, you know, she responds to one male, a whole bunch of males might see her. It gets to be like this very, very exciting, competitive dating scene. So yeah, I guess a lot of my adult life has been spent following fireflies around at night and watching their courtship and mating. It's a little strange.

• 16:14Alie Ward?

  What kinds of questions and answers are they looking for? Are they looking for who has the shortest pulses or the longest light? Or is it species specific?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it differs with different species, but in general, it seems to be the females are looking for males that are a little bit more conspicuous within the parameters of their species-specific flash code, right? A little bit more conspicuous than other males. So in some of the species where the males are giving like a single bleep. Bleep, bleep. Females will be looking for slightly longer leaps. Not necessarily something that you could see with your eye, or that you're with your brain, with the human brain, but the brain of a female firefly can make those distinctions.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  And they choose to respond to males that have slightly longer durations of those single flashes. And one of the things that, we weren't actually looking for this, but one of the things that we discovered was that, one of the reasons that female fireflies are so choosy is that males are giving females a, a present to the females. And it's called a nuptial gift. And totally, that's really the scientific term for it. It's like one of the best non-jargon scientific terms. Like, everybody understands, a nuptial gift. Yeah, that's what it is. So during mating,

• 17:48Speaker 01

  male fireflies are giving females not just their gametes, right? Not just their sperm, but also this package. And it's a really beautiful thing. It's like this very elaborate structure. If you happen to look inside a male firefly, which, you know, probably most people never have a chance to do. But it's incredible what's inside. They don't really have a digestive tract or any of the other, like, you know, liver, spleen, stomach, all that stuff that we think of as internal organs. Their internal organs are basically reproductive glands that manufacture this elaborate package that is full of nutrients. And they transfer that internally to the female while they're mating.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  And the males that have the more desirable flashes also turn out, in many cases, to have the larger nuptial gifts. And the nuptial gifts are a big deal for the females because they are full of protein, among other things, that the female then can use to provision her eggs. And so females that get more nuptial gifts actually are able to lay more eggs.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  So that's a cool thing. I mean, why not choose?

• 19:06Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I mean, if you kind of know through advertising, like, okay, longer pulse, bigger gift, then there you go. Like, bigger sandwich is gonna bring me.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We call it Firefly Bling.

• 19:19Alie Ward?

  Just a side note, right before recording this a few weeks ago, I was cranky as hell, and I could not figure out why. And then I realized that we had run out of coffee that morning. And so Jared, then simply my fiance, ran out to get my favorite latte as kind of a prenuptial gift, one might say. And my tiny brain was indeed impressed, and I was very grateful to have those nutrients. And I feel like it's important to note that he did not deliver this latte internally or during a copulatory act, because I'm not, I don't have that big a coffee problem. And what about you? Are you a night person? How much of your work involves these really long nights?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy. You know, I don't know what people who live in the tropics where firefly season is all year round. I don't know how they survive, because, you know, in the temperate zone, you have a kind of a short firefly season. It might go from, I don't know, like, May until September, or maybe just June, July, August. And during the firefly season, my students and I, basically, we work day and night. We get so strung out, it's ridiculous. We can't even think straight. People hate us. Our partners, like, leave us. Our dog, you know, walks out. It's really bad. You can do it for a few years, and then

• 20:36Speaker 01

  you have to take a break. But, you know, we're usually out in the field at night. And then we are often doing lab experiments with fireflies that we've collected from the field, and then put on a reverse, like, light cycle, so that they think it's nighttime, when it's actually daytime. And so during the day, we work in a dark room on fireflies that think it's night. So you can get kind of strung out on that for, for after a while. But, you know, it's, it's all worth it. Yeah, it's fabulous to be able to bring some of the, you know, magic of these creatures to light, and to let people know, you know, that they're real. And they're really, really kind of amazing.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  They're real, and they're spectacular.

• 21:22Alie Ward?

  And you mentioned the tropics and the temperate zones. Does that mean that they don't inhabit like arid climates as much? Why don't we have them in California?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so another myth that I am actually really glad to, well, happy to be able to debunk is that a lot of people think that there aren't any fireflies in the Western United States. And that's not true. So happy, you should be happy. You should be happy because there are, um, so there's at least three different kinds of fireflies. There's the daytime fireflies. They fly during the daytime. The adults don't light up, even though the larvae do. They're still in the same firefly family. There's lots of those in California and in the West.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  There are also glowworm fireflies where the females typically, um, well, the females glow. Typically, they are worm-like, as in they don't fly. And there's really, really cool glowworm fireflies on the West Coast, including, you gotta Google this, the California pink glowworm. Oh, my God, they're so beautiful. They are really beautiful and they're all over California. And I don't know why people don't recognize those as fireflies. The males don't light up, but the females do. They glow for hours to attract these flying, unlit males. And they're really, really cool.

• 22:52Alie Ward?

  Okay, hold the phone. Boy, howdy, hot damn. What? Okay, so I'm a lifelong Californian, absolute sniveling simp for bugs. And yet this is the first I'm hearing ever of the pink glowworm. Alias, the firefly beetle, Microfetus angustus. Now, the ladies stay kind of baby-like in a larva-ish form and they just cruise the leaf litter, kind of like salmon-colored, segmented, tiny hot dogs. And then their soulmates are dude beetles who fly around, not glowing, but just looking out for butts. Now, I have spent my life jealous of New Jersey and ignoring all of these horny, Baby-like sparkle butts under my California nose.

• 23:35Alie Ward?

  But as long as we're getting regional, I covered this ages ago in a minisode you probably never heard, but do you call them, you personally, do you call them fireflies or lightning bugs? Take a moment, vote aloud while you're layering up a lasagna or welding something or brushing a chinchilla. Lightning bugs?

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Lightning bugs?

• 23:56Alie Ward?

  Okay, I hope one of you said peeny wallys. Because a University of Cambridge linguistics professor by the name of Bert Voe also needed to know, firefly or lightning bug? So he asked 10,000 Americans what they call sparkle butts. Forty percent of you go either way, firefly, lightning bug, you don't care. Thirty percent of us are exclusively team firefly. Hello, West Coast. Hi, Massachusetts. And about another 30% say, yeah, no, it's lightning bug. The South, greetings to you. But to my delight, and probably Professor Voe's befuddlement, 0.02% of those people he polled call these glowing summer cuties peeny wallys.

• 24:41Alie Ward?

  So that's two people in a study of 10,000. And if they are not already friends, oh, I hope they find each other. I want them to hold hands and just stare into the summer dusk. So my point is, we need not be a nation divided on the topic of peeny wallys, especially now, because...

• 25:00Speaker 01

  And the other exciting news, and this is something that we're really just, actually, this is really, really recent, that we have begun to realize that there are flashing fireflies in the Western United States. So there's actually, there's a Western Firefly Project that's run out of the Natural History Museum of Utah. And they've been mapping flashing fireflies in Utah, Nevada, nearby states for, since 2014. There's a new project called the New Mexico Firefly Project. There's flashing fireflies in New Mexico, in Colorado. I heard a rumor there might be flashing fireflies in Oregon. So...

• 25:42Speaker 01

  A lot of this is very, very recent and a lot of it is based on citizen science, like community science observations, just people going out into the night looking for fireflies in different places where there are certain characteristics, like moisture, like darkness, and food for the firefly larvae. So, yeah, it's really exciting. There are western fireflies. That's a myth that it just gives me great pleasure to be able to say, "No, not true. You do have them and they're really, really beautiful." So, yeah.

• 26:17Alie Ward?

  So if you've been asking, "Fireflies, where have you been all my life?" The answer is perhaps closer than you thought, right here, literally with a flashing butt you just didn't notice. But where have we been all of their lives? How long do they spend in the inky evenings? What's up with their life cycle?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yes. So, one of the things that people who believe that fireflies are real and maybe have even seen fireflies, many people don't realize that what we're looking at when we see these ethereal adults flying around in the night, we're just looking at the very, very tip of the firefly lifecycle, like that. It's the tip of the iceberg. Fireflies spend up to two years living their lives in a completely different environment. So, fireflies are beetles and like other beetles, they go through complete metamorphosis. So,

• 27:15Speaker 01

  the adult firefly, the female, lays her eggs. The eggs hatch out into little tiny firefly larvae.

• 27:24Alie Ward?

  So, there are a few thousand species of fireflies and as adults, they're between five and 25 millimeters long, just an inch long at the biggest. But in their larval forms, they're little and they're hungry.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  And it's the larval stage where they are, they're eating and they're actually, they're predators. They're voracious predators. They're really kind of fearsome, voracious predators because they, they live underground and sometimes in rotting wood, sometimes in leaf litter. And they're burrowing around and they're looking for soft bodied things like earthworms, slugs, snails, and that's what they eat. And even though they're tiny, they have the ability to bite and paralyze prey that's many, many, many times bigger than themselves. So a couple

• 28:22Speaker 01

  of firefly larvae can take down a really big earthworm, paralyze it so that it basically can't move. It's still alive. Can't move, still alive, can't move. And then they will, yeah, they'll just feast on that earthworm for days and days and days and days.

• 28:38Alie Ward?

  Do they hunt in packs? Are they hunting in packs like wolves?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, we don't actually know what they do in the field, but there are many observations of, and I've seen it myself, in the lab, firefly larvae will gather together in groups to take down an earthworm. And you see them, oh man, it's just kind of gory. Like I've walked into at night, like you're just walking by and you have this little container where you have firefly larvae, right? Everybody has this in their house.

• 29:11Alie Ward?

  Oh, the delight it brought me to think of a firefly expert tossing their mail onto a kitchen counter next to a deli cup of thriving larvae. Sarah just has these things in her casual possession, of course. Man, if I had a container of firefly larvae for every container of firefly larvae I had in my house, oh.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  And a couple of earthworms. And you see that there's all this glowing and they're all lined up along the earthworm and all the firefly larvae are glowing and they're all, they just have their jaws sunk into the earthworm and the earthworm isn't moving at all. And they're lined up like, you know, kind of like suckling pigs. They're just like all lined up sucking earthworm, uh, like an earthworm smoothie. It's, it's a little, it's a little alarming and slightly disgusting. But anyways, that's what, that's the, that's the backstory of those ethereal adults is that they are larvae for up to two years, depending on the latitude. And during that time, they're just, they're just, you know, they're just eating and growing,

• 30:12Speaker 01

  eating and growing, eating and growing. And then when they get big enough, they pupate, you know, kind of like a butterfly, they metamorphose into an adult. The adult fireflies only live a couple of weeks, so very, very short-lived. And all they're doing is reproducing. Most adult fireflies don't eat anything at all, once they, once they reach that stage. And so, they're spending down the capital that they have accumulated, all the resources that they've managed to accumulate as larvae, is getting spent down in all of their reproductive activity. They're flying around, they're nuptial gifts. So, the nuptial gifts are kind of a big thing in the firefly economics, right? Because they're expensive for males to produce, they're spending down their capital with every nuptial gift that they're making.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  And they're really valuable for females, because she doesn't have any other income. It's just a nuptial gift. So...

• 31:03Alie Ward?

  Wow. Just revisit this drama with me, if you will. Come on this journey. So, let's say, you're a baby. You're a human baby, a small chubby baby who must grow. So, you post up with other babies around a giant paralyzed worm, like a beached whale. And you and all these babies just devour this whale-like carcass, until it's gone, and you do this for years. Imagine if humans spent most of our lifespans in focused bloodlust, eating raw meat, and then, in the very twilight of life, like when we're 80, we finally go through puberty. And for the equivalent of like, the last year of our human lives, out comes a different-looking person with a glowing disco ass, that makes people so

• 31:48Alie Ward?

  horny, and the world loves us. We're so beautiful, people assume we're not even real. And then all that flesh we ate all of our lives as babies, we use that fuel to pay baby mamas, so the kids we'll never meet can survive and follow in our sparkly footsteps. I mean, firefly life cycles. What a party. Do scientists know why they glow certain colors, and where is that bioluminescence coming from? I'm sure, your background is a marine biologist, lot of glowing stuff in the sea where it's dark, but not a lot of glowing stuff up here, so it seems. So, what's it made out of?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  A lot of creatures have independently evolved this amazing, fantastic ability to... Produce their own light. It's really fabulous. So, among terrestrial animals and plants, there's not that many that can produce lights, even though, produce their own light, even though it's really common in the sea. In the sea, a lot of marine creatures use their light for, as a defense, or as a way of hiding, camouflage, or as a way to attract prey. And fireflies use their light in many of the same ways. So every single juvenile firefly, those baby fireflies I was talking about that live

• 33:08Speaker 01

  underground or in leaf litter, they actually, every single juvenile firefly can light up, even when the adults can't. And so, we think that the ability, this light-producing talent of fireflies first evolved in the juvenile stage, and that it first evolved as a warning signal. So, firefly larvae and a lot of adult fireflies taste really nasty. They manufacture toxins that they carry inside their body that are distasteful to many insect-eating predators. And so, you know, if you live in the dark and there's no reflected light, it doesn't really help to be like brightly colored, like a monarch butterfly.

• 33:53Alie Ward?

  Or say brightly colored poison dart frogs, or skunk stripes. So this, yo, you do not want this, type of coloration has a name, and it's aposemitism, taken from the Greek words for "away sign." And aposemitism was coined in 1890 by a British zoologist who had a mustache like a Snow White feather boa, Sir Edward "Bag-nail" Poolton, in 1890. Because one of the pleasures of being an animal scientist is that you can make up words when you identify the need for them, like sparkle botology.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  All of those usual warning colors don't really work. But if you can make a flash of light, that turns out to be a very, very memorable kind of warning signal that flashes out in the darkness, you know, "I am toxic. Do not even think about eating me." And so, it was, so the first fireflies...

• 34:48Speaker 01

  By reconstructing their evolutionary history, we have figured out, scientists have figured out, that the very first fireflies, the adults didn't light up at all. And it wasn't until many million years later that some adult fireflies managed to co-opt that larval bioluminescence and turn it into the quick, bright flashes that the flashing fireflies now use to find their mates. So, fireflies started out, warning signal, and then later on, turned it to courtship. It's kind of romantic, right?

• 35:28Alie Ward?

  Imagine a dating app. It's like, oh, my God, you're toxic? I'm toxic. And then you just can't stop sending texts with your butts. That's the firefly life. And so this week for this encore, Dr. Lewis would like to keep these lovers alive and ask that her donation go to fireflyersinternational.net, which, as the name suggests, it's a global effort to catalyze the conservation of fireflies and their habitats. They do it through research to identify and prioritize the species that are facing extinction. They design and translate and distribute fact sheets on firefly diversity. They identify threats and they support advocacy, such as, for example, raising awareness during events like World Firefly Day, which is this week. It's July 5th and 6th.

• 36:13Alie Ward?

  So, celebrate a firefly. Share this episode with people. Post about it. Do some community science. Fireflies need you. So, that is fireflyersinternational.net, and that is linked in the show notes. And that donation we made in her name was possible by some word-approved sponsors of the show, who you may hear about now. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So, if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So, that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/.

• 36:58Alie Ward?

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• 37:38Alie Ward?

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• 38:13Alie Ward?

  Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my Ritual Essential for Women 18+ It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without them? Me. Didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients, two delayed-release capsules, designed for optimal absorption. But Ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists. They poured over thousands of studies to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet, but they don't actually consume. It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time, but it has these beads and oil, and it tastes like mint. Easy down the hatch. I usually take them in the morning.

• 38:58Alie Ward?

  And the reason why I've stuck with Ritual for so many years is because my schedule's all over the place. Sometimes I'm eating breakfast. Sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect Health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/ologies. That's ritual.com/ologies for 25% off your first month. Every time I record a Quince ad, I'm like, look at me wearing head to toe Quince. I feel like this is enough of an ad. I can just stop here. But if you're like, huh, what is that? Quince sells clothes and shoes and bags, even stuff for your house that are classic, well-made and priced at 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they cut out the middleman. They work directly with ethical factories.

• 39:41Alie Ward?

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• 40:24Alie Ward?

  And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies. It's the best way to support the show.

• 40:32Alie Ward?

  Okay, you were in the dark with some Firefly facts and Sarah had illuminating answers. Let's hear them. I have so many questions from listeners. Megan Walker wants to know, if you clap or make noise, do they flash? My dad told me that as a kid and it mostly seems to work, but I'm also skeptical that it's just coincidence.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Fireflies respond to a threat by often respond to a threat by making light because it is a warning signal. And so if you have a Firefly and it's, you know, just kind of hanging out in this container and you vibrate that container or knock on it or, you know, slap the side of the container, a Firefly will often flash. And so it's possible that clapping might be perceived as a disturbance and they would, they would light up as a way of saying, hey, don't eat me. I'm here. You know, I'm toxic.

• 41:26Speaker 05

  Can you not do that?

• 41:28Alie Ward?

  Got it. Okay. So many people wanted to know about catching them. And if you catch them and put them in a jar with with grass, how bad is it for them and will they die immediately?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  No, I think it's actually, you know, I love that people catch fireflies and then release them. I think it's a really, it's a beautiful thing. I think the more people that can appreciate these miraculous luminous beings, the better. And what better way to do it than to like get up close and personal with them? So, yeah, I think that as long as people realize that, you know, if you you catch a firefly, handle it really, catch it with a net, handle it really gently, coax it into a jar with some, as you say, with grass, maybe a little bit of damp, not like sopping wet, but damp paper towel, even a little tiny piece of apple. They'll really, really like the moisture from the apple and the sugars that are in the apple.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, watch them overnight. Make sure they have a lot of moisture in the jar. And then let them go into the same habitat where you collected them the next day. The only, so I'm all in favor of catch and release for fireflies. There's one caution that I have to mention, which is that this happened to my nephew many years ago. He was visiting from California. He was visiting in Vermont and he was really excited to see fireflies. And he went out and he caught a whole bunch and he put them in a jar and he put them on the night table next to his bed. And during the night, he woke up and he actually saw a very, very gory scene, which is pretty common.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Some of the fireflies were eating some of the other fireflies. So I haven't really mentioned this, but there's a particular group of fireflies just in North America. Yeah, we're proud. And they are predators of other fireflies. And what was going on in Nate's jar was that he had accidentally caught some of the prey fireflies and a couple of the predator fireflies. And the predator fireflies were like so excited and they were feasting on the other fireflies.

• 43:38Alie Ward?

  Oh, man.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  And he was like, he screamed in the middle of the night. We had to get up, go running into his room. He was fine, the fireflies were not. And Then we had to explain like the whole, you know, predation thing. And yeah, so be careful to only include the little guys and none of the big predatory ones. Oh, no.

• 43:59Alie Ward?

  So, yes, Photurus, these predatory females, whom Sarah has called the femme fatale of lightning bugs, are great at doing impressions of other species, but they're not great at making their own lucibofogens. Lucibofogens? Sure, which are steroid compounds that make them less tasty to birds and spiders and such. So catfishing and preying on other glowing beetles gives them more defense against predators. So for those who wish that there were raves that were also gladiatorial matches, congratulations, sickos. Your time has arrived. Davis Bourne, Annie Hardkey, Kevin Glover, Lisa Ma, want to know, why do they smell that way?

• 44:44Alie Ward?

  Do they smell?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, that's so interesting. What, what great questions. Thank you all. So when you handle fireflies, they do give off a particular odor. And that odor is part of their sort of, we call it a multimodal defense mechanism. But it's, they have the light that they're using as a warning. They have a kind of smell, a volatile smell that they release that warns potential predators that they are going to taste bad. And then if you were to taste a firefly, which I don't recommend, you would, or even like, you know, gently bite into a firefly, which I don't recommend.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Fireflies release a tiny droplet of blood. And the blood that circulates inside their bodies contains a toxin that is very, very deadly to many vertebrate predators. So, yeah, that smell is something that a lot of people don't even notice it, but it's really, really noticeable. If you hold a firefly in your hand, just hold it up to your nose. They get disturbed if you're capturing them, and then they have that particular odor. And Yeah, that's cool. It's part of their defense against getting eaten.

• 46:02Alie Ward?

  Side note, I have never sniffed a peony wally, but the internet told me that they smell like the following adjectives: musky, cucumber-esque, and buggy. Oh, yes, buggy. It's very helpful. Either way, the taste and those aforementioned lusobufojen steroids can make a frog or a bird think twice and maybe barf it right up, although plenty of folks report seeing fireflies illuminating the stomachs of their predators, which is kind of like being eaten by an alligator, yet continuing to swipe on Tinder from its murky, disgusting belly. But yes, that sparkle buttology smell is the sweet odor of love and warnings. Aha, so sniff a firefly.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Sniff a firefly today, or tomorrow, or tonight.

• 46:48Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Natella wants to know, why do fireflies like overgrown grass more than cut grass? And what can people with yards do to encourage more fireflies?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So, one of the things about fireflies is that they need the same kinds of things that all of us need, right? So they need food, they need shelter, they need moisture. And so if you can provide those things, you can usually encourage fireflies, if they're around in your area, to move into your yard. And so, one really important thing for all of the stages of, all the life stages of the firefly, is moisture. And so, longer grass holds moisture better. It holds moisture in the soil better, and

• 47:39Speaker 01

  it will be more conducive for females to lay their eggs at the base of the grass, and for the larvae to develop in that habitat. It's also better for, longer grass is better for all the soil organisms, like the earthworms and all those things that the baby fireflies are eating as prey. I guess the biggest thing, if you want to promote fireflies in your, um, in your yard, is to leave your grass long, or better yet, make it into a wildflower meadow.

• 48:12Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Plant some, fireflies also need darkness, so a lot of the work that we are currently doing at my lab at Tufts focuses on light pollution and how light pollution impacts fireflies. And it turns out that lights, even pretty dim lights, can really, really disrupt the courtship dialogue of fireflies. And so if you have like layers of shrubs and trees, if you happen to have streetlights around, or other lights that are shiny into your yard, having a lot of layers of vegetation will help make dark places where the fireflies can court.

• 48:50Alie Ward?

  So you're not letting your lawn go to shit. You're making a romantic environment where sparkle butt beetles can get nasty. So what else do you need to do to set the mood and help them thrive?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  So, fireflies need dark lights, they, they need moisture, and they also, fireflies are insects, and so you definitely do not want to be treating your yard or your garden with any kind of broad spectrum insecticides, because anything that you, remember the, the baby fireflies spend months to years living underground. So if you're treating your yard or you're, if you happen to have a lawn and you're treating it for Japanese beetle grubs, you're going to be killing the firefly larvae that live in the lawn too.

• 49:37Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  So be really, really thoughtful about using insecticides only where and when you need them. Try to target them to specific pests. And then also, in addition to sort of shading, shading your yard, if you have a place where there's fireflies and you can control the light in that firefly habitat, just turn your lights off during the firefly mating season. Give them a little privacy, you know, let Do their thing. And then, you know, in the wintertime, you can have your lights back on again as much as you want. But if you can shield your lights, or dim them, or put them on timers so that they're off during the firefly mating season, that would be really, that's a great way to attract fireflies to your yard.

• 50:25Alie Ward?

  Great. Alexis Cully, first time question asker, wants to know if any fireflies flash different colors?

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there are slightly different colors. And they, so there are tiny, tiny differences in the, the shape of the enzyme, luciferase, that produces, that's inside the firefly lantern, and that is one of the players that produces the, actually, it's the catalyst for the bioluminescence. And so tiny differences in the shape of that enzyme actually create different colors. And so in North America, we have fireflies that range from yellow. So a lot of the fireflies that are flashing in the early evening have sort of a lime green or yellow color bioluminescence. There's other groups of fireflies that have

• 51:13Speaker 01

  a more amber colored bioluminescence. And then there's some late night fireflies that flash with a very green bioluminescence. And so they, they do have different colors.

• 51:24Alie Ward?

  Oh, okay. Do any change their colors like an LED light at all?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Ooh, that would be cool. Not yet, but I think they're working on it. We're looking at for mutations right now.

• 51:37Alie Ward?

  Oh, amazing. Oh, so many great questions. Casey Hanmer wrote in and said, I think luciferase is an amazing name for a child, but my wife says, no, what the fuck? Help me out?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yes, luciferase. I love it. Yeah, you know, um, hey, Ace. Yes, it's great.

• 51:57Alie Ward?

  That is great. And it means light, right? Lucifer comes, means light, right?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Right. Luciferase means light bearer. It's a beautiful name for a kid.

• 52:06Alie Ward?

  Also, how Satan biblically became Lucifer may have just been the result of a translation snafu involving the Hebrew word for howl. So Casey, Christine, Name that next kid Luciferace. You have our blessing. And patron Nathan Algrim wrote in to say that they saw their first blue ghosts this summer. And it was quote, "trippy in the best way possible." And I'm glad for Nathan that this experience wasn't trippy in the worst way possible, which would have been an encounter with Helleucifer himself. But yes, you were not alone when it came to wondering about blue ghost fireflies and why they are such low-flying marvels. Oh, and Mila Kuda wants to know, what's the deal with blue ghost fireflies?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Hmm, the deal with blue ghost fireflies, they are magic, totally magic. So this is a firefly that's found throughout the southeastern United States in the southern Appalachian Mountains. And they're really, really cool because they're a glowworm firefly. The females are tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. They don't have any wings. They cannot fly. They are totally earthbound, which is sad. But they're also really beautiful. They're like these beautiful little jewels that are hidden in the forest, in the leaf litter in the forest. The males light up, in this case, and they fly around with a very, very long, like minutes-long glow.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  And for reasons that remain a bit elusive, but have something to do with sort of the physics of light, their light looks blue, but if you, if you record the light with a spectro, like a spectrograph, it actually turns out to be green.

• 53:52Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  So they're called blue ghosts because they look kind of bluish when they're, when it's reflected off the vegetation. And so, but they're really glowing green. And one of the things about the blue ghost fireflies that's quite remarkable is that they've gotten to be a pretty big tourist attraction in the past few years. And fireflies in many places are actually kind of flickering out. In most cases, it's because their habitat is being lost. In some cases, it's because their local Population is being threatened by either light pollution or even tourism.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  And so the blue ghost fireflies are particularly susceptible to too much attention from tourists. When the season begins, the females are down in the in the leaf litter and on the forest floor. And so if there's a lot of people who are walking through their habitat, they actually don't, they're often looking at the males that are flying around and not really realizing that they could be accidentally trampling these tiny females and also the larvae and also the eggs and also the pupae. And it's the females that are carrying like the next generation of fireflies. So when people are going to see blue ghost fireflies, I I do highly recommend going to see them, but stay on the trail.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Don't walk off into the forest because you might be trampling on those beautiful little females.

• 55:20Alie Ward?

  Yeah. And then, which is probably the last thing people want to be doing without realizing that they're doing it. So.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You wouldn't, how would you ever know?

• 55:27Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Patrons Ally Gibson, first time question asker, Ivy Lee Sanchez, Chris Moore, Ally Barg, Rose Moon Yards, Kent Durven, and so many people. Claire Weldon, Tegan Mortimer, first time question asker, Anthony, Katie Courteney, Alex Stahl, have said, wanted to know about the numbers of fireflies. Anthony says, why is it some years we have tons and tons and other years almost none? And Claire says, I've heard a lot the last few years about major declines in firefly populations. Alex Stahl says, growing up, I remember seeing fireflies all the time, but it's been ages since I saw any. How are they doing and what can we do to help?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Great questions. Yes, thank you. So, you know, like other insects, fireflies have good years and bad years. And so in a really, really dry year, there's a lot of mortality, especially of the larvae. And so there won't be as many fireflies, the adult fireflies emerging the following spring and summer. And sometimes in a wet year, you know, there's lots of prey. There's they're doing really, the larvae are surviving really well. There'll be a lot of fireflies that year. And so they do have good years and bad years. But in general.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  It's a really, really common perception and it's something that a lot of firefly experts and, you know, people on the street have noticed that there just aren't as many fireflies as there used to be. And this holds across the board around the world. It's not just, you know, something that happens in the, in the United States. And so there are three major things that are responsible for declining firefly populations. The first one is the loss of suitable habitat. So some fireflies are really, really tuned in to a very particular habitat, like one particular kind of wetland, and that's the only place that they can survive. That's where their larvae live, that's where the, where they can pupate, where they can

• 57:29Speaker 01

  complete their whole life cycle. If you wipe out that wetland, those fireflies can't just get up and move somewhere else. There are other fireflies that are like habitat generalists. They can live in all kinds of places, they're doing fine. The habitat specialists are not doing so well.

• 57:45Alie Ward?

  So yes, some sparkle butts do well sauntering between various habitats, but other tender, glowy babies have evolved to thrive in only one specific ecological niche.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  So the loss of, and the degradation of appropriate habitat is a really, really big problem for many species of firefly, including a bunch of US fireflies that are specialists in, in wetland habitats. The second thing that is really bad for fireflies, we've already talked about a little bit, they need dark nights. And so, light pollution is a big threat to fireflies around the world. And, so you can turn off your lights, that's a, that's an easy thing to do. Light pollution is totally reversible.

• 58:31Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Just turn that switch. And then insecticides is a, is a, a third major threat to fireflies. So pesticides that are applied to...

• 58:43Speaker 01

  To the soil or to, um, to plants that then get into the soil and will kill firefly larvae. So I guess, you know, one of the things that, that we've been doing, so I work with the, the group called Fireflyers International. And one of the things that we have been doing is trying to educate people about the different life stages of fireflies, the, the things that they need, um, and, um, to advocate for their protect, protection. We've been working with the Xerces Society in the US and you can go to the Xerces Society, uh, website.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Just Google Xerces, um, Fireflies and there's a whole lot of information, um, free PDFs that you can download about conserving fireflies and what you can do to, um, and there's actually, we have, um, fact sheets about fireflies and light pollution, so firefly friendly lighting guidelines. And you can get all that stuff at the Xerces website.

• 59:44Alie Ward?

  Listen, I get it. You're listening to this while paddling a gondola or herding penguins. And you're like, you're my internet dad. Look it up for me. So Xerces recommends using motion detectors or timers to limit the amount of time lights shine, shielding lights so they only illuminate the intended areas like a pathway, switching out bright outdoor lighting for red bulbs or covering existing bulbs with red filters, and closing curtains at night to reduce the amount of indoor lights that spill outdoors. So more info is up at xerces.org and also get Dr. Sarah Lewis's book Silent Spark, which is linked in the show notes. It will delight and inform you. Also, I just realized when I said herding penguins, it sounded like herding penguins,

• 1:00:28Alie Ward?

  but I meant like, there's a herd of penguins that you're, I don't want to make it sound like you're just out there herding penguins. Anyway, what else can you do? Are there any community science projects that people can help out with?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's so much we don't know about fireflies. So as I mentioned, there's especially a lot we don't know about fireflies in the Western US. And so I highly recommend the Western Firefly Project, just Google it. And they're collecting, right now, collecting observations from people all over the West of flashing fireflies. And that's really exciting. There's a New Mexico Firefly Project that just started this year. And that's really exciting. People are discovering like all new fireflies. We never even knew that they were in some of these places. So there's a lot of really, it's a very exciting time to be a community scientist for fireflies.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  We really, fireflies are out for a short time each night and also a short season each year. And so we really need many eyes in many places. So those are two things, the Western Firefly Project and the New Mexico Firefly Project. And then also, across all of the US, there is Firefly Watch, which is run by Massachusetts Audubon Society. And you can find out more about that community science project on their website.

• 1:01:51Alie Ward?

  So 2025, Ally here. And Dr. Lewis shared in her update that new projects are rolling out in North America and elsewhere, where community science can help gather really valuable data on species distributions. One of those places is fireflyatlas.org. And that was launched in 2022, is right after this episode aired, and we'll link it on our website. And fireflyatlas.org, it's a big collaborative effort. And Sarah tells me that firefly experts and Dr. Sparklebutts need more information on species distributions and habitat associations and threats so that they can make informed management and conservation decisions. And fireflyatlas.org has a map of North America. And if your region is highlighted, you can click on it to learn which firefly species

• 1:02:36Alie Ward?

  they're searching for and how you can help them. Now, how are the fireflies doing? Dr. Lewis let me know that after this episode initially aired, there was an international effort. It was published in the 2024 study. It was titled "Illuminating Firefly Diversity: Trends, Threats, and Conservation Strategies." It was in the journal Insects, and it outlines the main threats linked to the recent population declines. And they are habitat loss and degradation, light pollution, pesticide overuse, climate change, and tourism. And although this big global coordination of conservation has begun only recently, considerable progress has already made, she told me. So that's a good news. And Sarah also said that here in the good old USA,

• 1:03:20Alie Ward?

  we successfully petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to add this critically endangered Bethany Beach firefly. It's a species that lives in a tiny stretch of Delaware to the endangered species list. And they're working to get legal protection for other at-risk fireflies and their habitats. So they're working on it. And firefly scientists have also gathered enough data to do official IUCN Red List assessments for around 150 species from all over, from the US, Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia. And Dr. Lewis added that, well, this is just a fraction of global firefly diversity. The bad news is that about 20% of species assessed to date face heightened extinction risks.

• 1:04:04Alie Ward?

  Now, in terms of spreading the concern and appreciating fireflies, how can you capture them? But not physically. Oh, and what about photography? Any any hints on capturing good firefly photos?

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Yes. So I would like to say that personally, I am in awe of the many, many firefly photographers out there who capture these beautiful, long exposure images of fireflies. And in these images, you can often see the flash pattern of the firefly. You can almost identify like what species of firefly it is from the photograph. But I have no idea how they do that.

• 1:04:50Alie Ward?

  It's okay. I looked up some tips for us. So basically, get a tripod, slow down the shutter speed, open your lens up wide, and crank up your camera's sensitivity to light, or its ISO. If you don't have a fancy camera that is also not a phone, then there are apps like ProCam 8 that have presets like low light and light trails. And you can also do a slow shutter mode, which stacks a bunch of images on top of each other to create a longer exposure effect. But patience and experimentation, maybe a late night energy drink, all help. Or, you know what? Just leave it to the pros.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Actually, I'll just put a shout out here to one of the firefly photographers we've worked with very closely on our conservation efforts, has a website. It's called Firefly Experience. His name is Radim Schreiber, and he takes pictures of fireflies using just their natural light, never any flash, never any extraneous light. And his photographs are really, they're amazing, and they really capture the personality of each of the different kinds of fireflies. So I highly recommend Firefly Experience.

• 1:06:00Alie Ward?

  Cool. Last listener question. Sarah Hoover, Cameron Brown, and RJ Doidge all asked if you have thoughts on the song "Fireflies" by Owl City, if it ever gets stuck in your head. Have you heard of this?

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  That's so funny. Yes, I don't really like that song because, you know, I don't know, the 10,000 hug stuff.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not my favorite firefly song. You know, there's a really cool, there's a glow worm song that was popular, I guess, in the 1950s. My mother used to sing it to me when I was little. Hey, maybe that's why I study fireflies. Not sure. Anyways, Mills Brothers glow worm song, I like that one a whole lot better.

• 1:06:57Alie Ward?

  Did we just discover why Sarah Lewis is a firefly scientist? Did that just happen? I don't know. I guess. Either way, sing to your loved ones, ask smart people weird but well-intentioned questions because you never know what's underneath the rocks on the topic of

• 1:07:17Alie Ward?

  Last questions I always ask everyone, your least favorite thing about being a sparklebotologist or least favorite thing about fireflies, is there anything that's just an annoyance or you wish was different?

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and it's undoubtedly mosquitoes. So there's a really high correlation between, you know, fireflies like places where there's a lot of moisture and so do mosquitoes and it's nighttime. And so, yeah, I think the hardest thing for a lot of my students and for myself, working on fireflies, is just like, not necessarily like the mosquitoes are gonna bite you because usually you're covered up completely, long sleeves, sometimes we wear rubber gloves and we have like mosquito gear on, anti-mosquito gear on, but it's the sound of the mosquitoes, that little, you know, that whine. And it just like, sometimes I would go to sleep finally after a really

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  long night and I'd still like, in my dreams, I would hear that, that whine of the mosquitoes just like buzzing around my head. And yeah, that was really kind of traumatic for a couple of years in there.

• 1:08:26Alie Ward?

  And lastly, difficult to answer, but your favorite thing about fireflies or being a firefly scientist?

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah. So this is easy because, you know, the thing that I really, really appreciate, I just feel so fortunate to be able to like have devoted so much of my scientific career to studying such a wondrous animal. Like you just, like every single season, you know, I do, you know, my science and like write all the notes and take all the measurements and stuff, but every single season I always spend at least one night that I just dedicate to wonder. I don't, I just like put everything else out of my

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  mind and I just go out and gawk at the fireflies and just drink in the wonder. And man, it's a really incredible thing. And it's not just, you know, that the They don't just bring that wonder to me, but to everybody who sees them. So you know, they are some of the best ambassadors for Earth's natural magic. And so, man, I feel so lucky to be like, you know, representing them to, to, and telling people about them and learning more about them. It's just like, I just feel like, super, super, super grateful to the fireflies, lucky to have found this niche.

• 1:09:56Alie Ward?

  Well, they, I think they're lucky to have a spokesperson as knowledgeable and enthusiastic as you, for sure.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  You are very kind. Thank you.

• 1:10:06Alie Ward?

  Thank you so much for doing this. This is just a joy. I love this.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  It's been really, really fun. Thank you so much for inviting me.

• 1:10:14Alie Ward?

  So yes, get Sarah Lewis's book, Silent Spark. It's linked in the show notes below. Just a social media update. Dr. Lewis, like millions of us, is no longer on X, but she is on threads at @silentspark. And she says that those curious about fireflies could join or follow her on Facebook in a firefly group there. So we will link that also on the show notes. And she also shared that later this summer, fireflyers from all over the planet will be gathering in Mexico to attend the International Firefly Symposium, where they're going to report on new discoveries about firefly ecology and behavior, and exchange ideas and methods, and share their most effective conservation strategies. So, uh, to be a

• 1:10:56Alie Ward?

  firefly on the wall there. You would make so many new friends. And Dr. Lewis also said to the Ologies community, thanks again for helping to keep the firefly magic alive. And we will link Dr. Lewis's website in the show notes. And also in the show notes is a link to our website, which will point you toward all the resources and studies and maps and pictures that we talked about in this episode. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm at @AllyWard with one L on both. Thank you, Erin Talbert, for adminning the Ologies Podcast Facebook group and for being my friend for decades. Thank you, Noelle Dilworth, for scheduled producing Ologies. Susan Hale, managing directs everything from the tiny stuff to the giant stuff. Stephen Ray Morris and Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media, where the editors-

• 1:11:38Alie Ward?

  For this episode, and when it initially came out, I had been married to Jared Sleeper for about a week. So we're now about on our fourth anniversary. Things are still going great. And folding in all the updates for this was Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, who the entire Ologies staff threatens to move in with whenever she sends us pictures of all the cool bugs up in her Canadian yard. Mercedes, please fluff up the couch for me. We also now have Smologies episodes, which are G-rated and kid-safe, and they are in their own podcast feed. Wherever you get podcasts, they're great for kids and road trips. Just look for Smologies. They're also linked in the show notes. Ologies merch is at ologiesmerch.com. And join our Patreon. You can find us at patreon.com/ologies, where

• 1:12:21Alie Ward?

  you could submit questions we may ask on the show. Nick Thorburn did the theme music, and if you stick around until the end, I tell you a secret. And this one is a classic. It haunts me to this day. I'm glad I got it off my chest. If you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week, we did a lot of driving through Montana, in which gambling is legal in that state. And whenever I see a casino billboard that advertises loose slots, I always think of just terrible food poisoning, just like eating bad shrimp from the buffet at heaven. Loose slots all weekend. Just chained to the jackpot, if you will. Anyway, it's gross. I can't remember if I've told you that before, but now you know. Sorry. Bye-bye.

• 1:13:21Alie Ward?

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• 1:13:56Speaker 06

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