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I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to g
by thatguy0900 6y ago
I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to go out all the time during summer as a kid to catch them, they would light up whole fields. That was just like 15 years ago. Pretty sobering realization
- jriot 6y agoMy backyard in Louisiana has quite a few of them at night. I see probably 20 - 50 a night back there.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 6y agoDo you like Louisiana? I've been looking for a warmer, Southern state to move to.
- sonar_un 6y agoMy backyard in Louisiana has zero, zilch, nada. However; when I lived in NYC, I would see them all of the time on riverside.
- thatguy0900 6y agoLucky. I'm tempted to drive out to rural Ohio with my nephew to try to find some.
- burke 6y agoSame in Ottawa, Ontario—only a few times a year, but when they're out, there are loads of them.
- linuxftw 6y agoUsed to be 100's or 1000's of them during the peak in summer where I lived. Now it's a handful. This is out in a rural area, so urban lighting doesn't explain the decline. If I had to wager money, I'd say it was a blight introduced by another insect. Around the same year I saw an invasion of Asian lady bugs, the firefly memories stop. There were literally millions and millions of those Asian lady bugs released or hatched one year.
- hn_check 6y agoPlenty of fireflies in my yard. As prevalent as ever [1]. This is just an anecdote, but I give that anecdote as another person who lives in a somewhat rural location. Speaking of the lady bug explosion, this year they are incredibly rare [2]. Not sure why, but they went from being a massive nuisance to being a very rare sight (of any variety). Humans are absolutely having a calamitous effect on insect life in a variety of dimensions, however on the flip side it does seem like insect populations massively fluctuate for entirely natural reasons. A bit of an early summer, or more rain in April, etc, and one insect type explodes and another wanes. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24071745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24071745 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24071745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24071745
- glennpratt 6y agoI've listened to this conversation several times without looking it up, so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly#Conservation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly#Conservation "Firefly populations are declining worldwide, for a variety of reasons.[25] Fireflies, like many other organisms, are directly affected by land-use change (e.g. loss of habitat area and connectivity), which is identified as the main driver of biodiversity changes in terrestrial ecosystems.[26] Pesticides and weed-killers have also been indicated as a likely cause of firefly decline.[27]" "Finally, since fireflies depend on their own light to reproduce [28] they are also very sensitive to environmental levels of light and consequently to light pollution.[28][29] Multiple recent studies investigate deeply the effects of artificial night lighting on fireflies.[30][31]" [25]: https://www.firefly.org/ https://www.firefly.org/
- sethammons 6y agoFireflies get killed by insecticides used for mosquitoes
- echelon 6y agoIt's also past peak firefly season, which is mid May to early June in North America. Georgia has lots of them. Or at least we did last year. I haven't gotten out much in the COVID-19 world. A year without fireflies.
- abstractbarista 6y agoI saw more than I've seen in many years the other night. Seems to just depend on the area.
- wenc 6y agoI'm in Chicago (in a neighborhood close to downtown) and in previous years I'd hardly ever seen any fireflies. This year, they're everywhere -- in parks and even in trees on neighborhood streets. I understand fireflies are sensitive to light pollution. I can't imagine Chicago's any different from other major cities. COVID has people staying home a lot more but that has nothing to do with street lighting. I wonder what's going on. I do think that living organisms are extraordinarily adaptable if the changes are gradual and bounded. Most of us have this idea that an ecosystem is this delicate and fragile thing, but nature actually has a lot of robustness and redundancies built-in (which are inefficient but increase chances of group survival).
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoWe live rural southern Ontario and fireflies are usually just a single weekend or so at the end of June or beginning of July. But this year they went on for almost two months. They only just stopped about a week ago. I'm not sure why it was a good season for them. Like you say, traffic, lighting, pesticide sprays on farms, all really the same despite COVID. Reduced air traffic I don't think would have an affect? Even after I sprayed my vineyard with insecticide to deal with japanese beetles they were fine, and continued to prosper in and around there. It may just be that we've had an unusually hot dry year, I assume where you have as well. Maybe that's advantageous for them somehow?
- nashalo_nighly 6y agoI feel that I hear people say « we’re having a unusually hot dry year » every year...
- gre 6y agoFor me it's red wasps. Growing up in Texas there used to be so many, you could see them flying low searching for spiders in the grass. Last Sunday, in the heart of summer, I couldn't find a single red wasp where there used to be hundreds.
- hinkley 6y agoI have a fallow field, and in perhaps two hours of dedicated observation I've got about 10 species of insect I need to identify, and for a couple of them I'm not even sure what kind of bug they are (I'm probably going to have to scan a field guide). The lot is between the river and our local garden district. I suspect I'm part of a migration route between them (I figured I was too far from the river for dragonflies, but I see at least 2 a day) It's changing my plans for the space a bit.
- reportingsjr 6y agoWould highly suggest checking out the iNaturalist app. It doesn't always nail down insects/plants/etc, but a lot of the times it gives you a good guess and other, more experienced people will come along and give a better id.
- pak9rabid 6y agoThere certainly hasn't been a shortage of yellow jackets for me here though (Texas).
- DSingularity 6y agoYeah I feel the same. I recently felt pretty astonished after seeing them again once I went out in the woods.
- novaleaf 6y agoand to your children, it will be the way nature always was.
- formerly_proven 6y agoLast time I've seen a firefly must have been at least ten years ago.
- disambiguation 6y agoi live in brooklyn, the nearby parks have plenty of fireflies around dusk
- epanchin 6y agoDriving through Europe one finds the front of the car covered in squashed insects. Drive through the UK and there are none. Depressing.
- hinkley 6y agoI didn't take the insect apocalypse seriously until I realized how much less time I'm spending washing bugs off my car. It was sort of my Silent Spring moment.
- fiblye 6y agoYeah, I remember my parents needing to clean their windshield every time we went on the highway. It'd get absolutely caked in yellow and brown spatters after merely an hour or two. As for me, I've never cleaned my windshield in my life. The rain washes off the little bits of dust. There's nothing else to clean.
- autisticcurio 6y agoIt depends where in the UK you are driving, I have to wash the car after every major journey > 1hr long because its covered in dead insects and the red, I guess blood, staining the paint. I would say there has been more sightings of wildlife and more insects this year because of lockdown, more hedgehogs seen walking on the roads, more deer, rabbits and plenty of insects especially at night at the moment. So I normally walk my dog with a headtorch at night as its cooler for him to run around off the lead but the insects getting attracted to my headtorch this year is a stupid amount to the point I've stopped taking him out at night. Germany may be onto something by reducing the light sources. Where I live we do have LED street lamps which cast a very definite circle of light on the road, but there is no "side leakage" of light so its darker walking between street lamps. You also dont get any orange glow into your house or bedroom window like the old style street lamps used to do which can keep you awake especially when stressed. The number of small birds nesting in the area has also gone up over the last two years but its nice watching them feeding on insects crawling up and down plants like rose bushes, or hanging onto the side of brick houses getting the odd bug.
- fasteddie31003 6y agoI was driving though Nebraska a few months ago and there were so many fireflies it looked like a scene out of Avatar.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mattoxic 6y agoIt hit me a couple of years back, a night time drive through the Australian countryside and your car would be plastered with insects - not anymore. And fireflies, I haven't seen one in years,
- TheSmiddy 6y agoYes 10 or 15 years ago driving from Adelaide to Melbourne would require a halfway pit stop to manually clean the windscreen because the wipers weren't able to cope with all the bug guts. Last year i did it and didn't need to even use the wipers once. Our insect loss is much more likely due to climate change than light pollution though due to our sparse population between the cities.
- distances 6y agoIs there agriculture in those areas? I've been assuming it's mostly insecticides, as my home country hasn't warmed up that much yet.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago21 years old and I have never seen a firefly. Figured they were an American thing. Did Australia have them?
- gcheong 6y agoI used to work summers out of college in an AK cannery. Some years there were barely any fish and the season would be closed early. Other years there was so much fish the cannery could barely keep up. Unless you're monitoring things regularly its hard to say whether there is an actual decline or not.
- toss1 6y agoYup, North of Boston here, fairly woodsy area, too many years seeing too few firefiles, although this summer there were a few more than past years - I hope it's a growth trend!
- nemo44x 6y agoUnless there is actual data it’s probably best to not trust your memory. Every time you remember something the reality of it changes. Memory is lossy. Bias and selection are favored over improvement or precision of recall. Every recollection is inferior to the previous one. I have a few memories of extensive fire fly experiences back in the day. But when I really think about it, I don’t remember all the days and years without a dramatic memory. And the ones I have may be distorted.
- ndespres 6y agoWhat? He says he remembers fields full of fireflies. Why imply that it's memory distortion? I'm surrounded by fields and in the high point or July there are breathtaking displays of fireflies at night, and it's not my imagination. Why tell someone that they misremembered that?
- nemo44x 6y agoI’m not saying that. Just asking if they remember an instance of it and comparing to a non-instance today. I think I worded it poorly.
- zaarn 6y agoOver the last 27 years, Insect biomass has dropped by more than 75% in protected areas in Germany. I don't think this is a memory issue. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- nemo44x 6y agoNo doubt. I was just pointing to a single instance and not saying they don’t remember well or that there isn’t data regarding insects in general. I had a similar thought a few years back and researched it only to find that the fire fly population where I lived hadn’t really changed. I just happened to be keying on a memory that had a large amount of them and not taking into consideration that wasn’t the standard case. That their yearly population is dependent on certain weather conditions during specific months. And that some years they have a bumper crop and others not so much, but on average look about the same. That doesn’t mean it’s the same story where they live of course. Probably worded it poorly though.
- jungletime 6y agoLots of fireflies in my backyard every night, probably because it is partially flooded due to the record high water levels in the Great lakes. Have been trying to film them. But subpar results so far. I have a vintage 70-200 lens adopted to m4/3. It says macro on the lens, but I can't focus on anything close at all.
- User23 6y agoNo shortage of lightning bugs here either. The only thing killing them is the spiders.
- jungletime 6y agoYou should definitely film that. I bet there are thousands of people that would watch a "firefly vs spider" death match on youtube.
- User23 6y agoSo far I've only discovered the aftermath, drained husks hanging in a web. If I can catch a spider in the act though that would be great and I'd definitely film it.
- rangibaby 6y agoI have a similar lens that says macro but only focuses a tiny bit closer at the wide end. If you don’t want to buy a real macro lens try an 85-135mm prime with an extension ring.
- iofiiiiiiiii 6y agoI have had similar realization with regard to simply mosquitoes. We used to have to put bug-nets on doors and windows to stop bugs flying in during the summer. Now, not needed anymore - at most we get one bug flying in per week.
- darkstar_16 6y agoSo true. We used to have fireflies everywhere when we were growing up. My daughter hasn't seen a single one in her 9 years in this beautiful world.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoI'm probably a bit North of you (Southern Canada) and this is the first year I've seen lots of fireflies at night. So there's a good chance it's more a case of migratory patterns changing than a mass die-off. Don't mean to make light of the matter, but it might not be as grim as it appears right now either.