“These are people on the ground who have been working with fireflies and they see what’s going on,” says Lewis. They surveyed 49 firefly experts from around the world, asking them to rank 11 potential threats in order of importance. Photograph: TorriPhoto/Getty ImagesĮarlier this month, Lewis and her colleagues published the first systematic review of threats to fireflies in the journal BioScience. Some south-east Asian firefly species only live along riverbanks in threatened mangrove forests. For most species there are only anecdotes, but they all tell the same story, and biologists who study wild fireflies are convinced. Citizen scientists have tracked the UK’s one firefly, the common glow-worm, Lampyris noctiluca, since the 1970s. “The best data we have is from the UK,” says Lewis. Fireflies are difficult to study: they are hard to find when not displaying. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which monitors thousands of species, only created its Firefly Specialist Group in 2018. The extent of the decrease is unclear because most firefly populations have not been tracked. It was co-authored by Lewis, who is now professor of evolutionary and behavioural ecology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and author of a book on fireflies, Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies. In 2019, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation published a report on North American fireflies, warning that “populations appear to be in decline”. However, fireflies are the most prominent. They are beetles.”įireflies are not the only luminous insects: three other beetle families have luminescent members, as do fungus gnats. All these terms are misleading, says Lower. In Europe they are often called glow-worms, while American fireflies with flashing lights are known as lightning bugs. Early in their history, they split into two groups, one of which spread throughout the Americas while the other colonised Europe and Asia.įireflies all belong to a family of beetles called Lampyridae. “The estimates we have currently are that fireflies are over 100m years old,” she says. There have been fireflies since the dinosaur era, says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Lower, an assistant professor of biology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Different species of firefly on display at the Forest Research Institute in Kuala Lumpur.
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