We used to have so many of them when I was a kid. Their numbers are dwindling. 😭
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor's yards. I'm the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.
A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.
Tumbler has one of the worst comment layouts...
Are actually that bright? Where I live they are very dim and green.
Also, people are born every day, and some just go on with their lives never learning about random facts like these. Every day, someone is one of the lucky 10k.
Man, imagine seeing a field of fireflies IRL for the first time, if you had never heard of them before! That would be pretty mindblowing.
I knew about them but didn't see them well into adulthood. It's underwhelming
Really? I'm a seasoned adult-er, and I still get a little flicker of wonder when i see those lights floating in the field behind my house on summer evenings.
I feel like fireflies have to be pretty perfectly whelming? like on the level of a swarm of pretty butterflies: cool, but not that cool.
I don’t know man, I’ve seen an actual swarm of butterflies (it took days for them to fly through) and it was pretty fucking awesome.
I think it's just because the only idea I had was from cartoons. They don't exist where I'm from.
They are still eery and cool though.
Your mum is underwhelming.
Indeed, she doesn't shine at all
coming from australia, this is super real… we have such a unique set of animals and plants that it’s all just so normal to us, but then you travel overseas and everything is like what you see on tv and in movies
i’m mid 30s, and last year i saw snow falling for the first time in chicago… snow falling is beautiful, and to most of the world it’s just normal - to australians, it just never happens
I hope you get many beautiful snowfalls in your life yet
You would not believe your eyes
I grew up calling them lightning bugs, and I'm so excited to see a thread full of people calling them the same!
In German, they're Glühwürmchen ("glow worms").
Wait hold up, in Dutch we have glimwormen ("shimmer worms" ) but those don't fly! They're actual bioluminecent worms.
Aren't German Glühwürmchen the same thing?
Interesting, interesting. We call the female lightning bugs here glow worms because they are wingless, but today I'm learning that is not the case for all species!
Also Glühwürmchen is a cute word.
My mom grew up in an area of California with no fireflies. When she was a teenager, she went on a cross-country trip with a friend. In the mountains of North Carolina, they were driving along at night when some bugs hit the windshield of their car. They didn't think much of it... until the bug guts started glowing. Then they screamed.
Different areas have different lightning bugs too. The ones in southern ontario are not the same as the ones in the midwest US.
They have distinct blinking patterns as well. IIRC observing the pattern is one of the ways used to classify them.
and colours!
I saw a few lightning bugs in my yard last year. My life goal have them consistently in my yard. Good thing this dovetails nicely with my other life goals of getting butterflies, bumblebees and birds in my yards
It's been more than 20 years since my wife moved to the west cost and she still laments the lack of fireflies. Where-as, whenever I've been out east, I'm caught off guard by them... then I start singing Roxanne.
You don't have to put on the gold light