Electronic fireflies.
Really. Now you can buy teensy-weensy robotic light-up insects for your yard. Cool or creepy? And BTW, are monkeys around the world familiar with glowy lightning bugs, or are they a North American thingie?
How bizarre. Half the fun watching fireflies (IMMO) is to see the flash at first and find where the bug lands...only to take off again....and then you see a second lightning bug, and a third, and you decide that maybe watching lightning bugs for 10 minutes or so is more important than whatever "urgent" thing you were obsessing about a moment ago.
Chalk up another victory for the manufactured magic industry )-: --though I suppose they might be useful for a film shoot or something.
This reminds me that I haven't seen fireflies in quite a few years. Stupid living-in-the-city.
I grew up in suburban new jersey & catching fireflies was a regular & lovely part of my childhood.
now I have been in california for 13 years & couldnt say when I last saw one. I have always felt bad for those who missed out on that little piece of childhood magic.
SO I AM SO HAPPY THAT THE MIRACLE OF MODERN CONSUMERISM MAGIC CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN FOR THEM NOW!!!!
/leaving now, don't mind me...
Fireflies are found in many places; John Buck is known for having looked into them in Asia, Africa and North America at least. Recently the theory of their flash synchronization has been studied/popularized by one S. Strogatz. There is a picture of firefly synchrony here, but that is a big pdf (long load); proceed with patience or just skip it.
Ah, fireflies. No experience as a young child quite equals the senseless destruction of removing their glowing butts and smearing them on a sibling.
jjray - that is totally gross.
I haven't seen one in years, but thinking about them now I really miss them. If I were a superhero I'd be the Amazing Firefly and all I would do would be to wander around to where it is dark and then provide light for people that needed it. Dark alley, fumbling for keys? Never Fear it's The Amazing Firefly!
Never saw a firefly or glowworm until I moved to the Eastern US ten years ago. I didn't know what was going on. thought I was having a stroke, all those little lights in my peripheral vision, on the ground, in the air. My so-called-friend laughed herself silly over that, and trots the story out in public whenever possible.
I love the little Luceferin-toting cockroach cousins, though. Electronic ones? I have to vote for creepy
Glow worm is used in some areas of North America instead of firefly, but both words seem to refer to the same beetle.
Fireflies are insects who eat other insects, so in an area where much spraying happens, such as suburbs, they'd be one of the species most affected.
Also, in some parts of the US, fireflies are collected and sold by weight for lab use, (I can't find any information about this being regulated) so this, too, could be a factor in reduced ranges/numbers of fireflies in some areas.
My inept googling tended to turn up "North America, east of the Rockies" as the range.
Oddly, what bothers me most about this idea is the fact that they can be used any time of year. For me, it still doesn't feel like summer until lightning bugs start coming out. Kind of silly, but that's how these associations work, I guess. (Pennsylvania native here.)
So "weird and fake" took a back seat in my gut reaction to "They can have them any time of year?! That's just wrong!"
beeswacky, my so-called-friend told me little glowworms (glimmer, glimmer) are ones that don't have wings. Certainly I see enough on the ground as well as in the trees but I've never caught one. Maybe the glowworms are just lazy or immature fireflies.
No electronic firefly can compete with the good old lightening bug. When I lived on the west coast for 10 years I saw nary a one. None of my friends or associates in the great northwest even knew what I was talking about, when I asked them if they had ever seen one. While visiting relatives in the midwest I collected some and tried to take some back with me, to Wa. state. They didn't survive the trip.
Lightening bugs were great fun as a kid. Gross or not I hear you jjray, I remember the senseless destruction and the smearing of bug abdomens. Seems every kid I grew up with did that also.
Lightening is supposed to be lightning, btw. Somedays I can spell, others I can't.
Lightning bugs is the name that was used for the fireflys, by the locals where I grew up.
In respect of Wurwilf's observation --
When the snow lies on the ground
Watch those fireflies come round
To hang like braids of blinking hair
From every lamp and chandeliere.
Dangling from the rafters in the barn
All snugged together so they can stay warm,
Aye, they'll come flittin' like the faery
Once there's hip deep snow in January.
NOT!
This is just a consumer version of the effect in Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride. I remember seeing it as a kid and asking my parents what the little lights were (I grew up in Southern California, no fireflys).
It begs the question; what other effects can be borrowed from theme park rides/movies and sold at a consumer level?
PatB the fireflies that don't fly aren't glow worms they are actually the females - in most if not all species the males are the only ones that can fly. For some glow worm info check here.
Squidranch: Personally, I employ a man dressed as a pirate to stand in my garden do a forward flip into a lake on fire every half-hour. The neighbours complain, but it adds value to my house no end.
We don't have fireflies or lightning bugs, but we do have glowworms. There's a colony of them on the walking track near my inlaws' batch (kiwi slang for holiday house) and you have to walk past them to get to the only flushing toilet for miles. Gorgeous at night, a surreal blue-white glow.
Thanks, a22lamia!
I'll keep calling them glowworms, though. I just like the song. ~when you gotta glow, you gotta glooowww~
I'm pretty much wholeheartedly in favor of disruping the west-of-the Rockies boime in favor of fireflies, by any means necessary. My wife has never seen one, and it's a sad thing.
(Grew up in the midwest, live in Seattle, miss the fireflies, not the weather.)
uh...
"biome. B-I-O-M-E. biome."
dang.
Never saw a lightning bug in the San Joaquin Valley in Calif., but did see a glowworm when I was in the first grade - somewhere around 1947. With all the pesticide spraying that goes on here now, I'd guess that none of them survive.
But, I did experience lightning bugs in Illinois, Oklahoma and New Jersey. Never got tired of them.
I'm South American, and I use to see them there too...when I came up here there was an absence of them, and I completely forgot about their existance (I was in an urban area) until recently when I moved to the sticks, and shazam! there they were! like a million little lights randomly swirling around everywhere...I love them.
Here in central CT there's tons of fireflys. There's also glowworms, which i've always assumed are firefly larva. Little grubs that glow constantly, no blinking. Check under rotting wood and rocks at the beginning of firefly season. There's various other glowy things around in the woods too. Mushrooms and other bugs, mostly. Once in a while when the conditions are right, the whole damn situation lights up with a glowy fuzz. Has to be a moonless night to see it. Some kinda fungus all over, giving everything a pale green outline.
The Mower to the Glow-worms
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light,
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate,
Ye country comets, that portend
No war, no prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass's fall;
Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand'ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;
Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac'd
That I shall never find my home.
-- Andrew Marvell
-- Andrew Marvell