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Here's good news in a gloomy economy: There's one form of wallet-friendly entertainment — meaning free — that's plentiful this summer. Fireflies are out in force.
“I think this year has been a particularly good year,” said Ted Burk, a Creighton University biology professor whose specialties include insects.
The population of fireflies, also known as lightning bugs, shows “a tremendous year-to-year variation,” for reasons that are not well understood, he said.
This just happens to be a good year, which is lucky for people whose idea of thrills is sitting on the front porch watching bug butts wink on and off through a sweet summer evening.
Better not dally, though. Late July is getting toward, ahem, the tail end of the firefly season.
Don't tell the little kids, but of course you've already heard about why the bugs are doing all that flashing. It's all about sex. The males fly over the ground, flirting. A female flashes back if she sees what she likes. The males — lots of them, desperate — converge. More flashing. Long story short: the foundation is laid for next summer's firefly population.
Scientists don't fully understand why that population varies so greatly — up to perhaps a tenfold difference from year to year, Burk said. Fireflies haven't been extensively studied, he said, because unlike other insects they don't have much commercial impact on anything.
In contrast, “boy, we know more about grasshoppers than anything else,” he said, because they have a long history of chewing up valuable crops.
Fireflies? They're more of an entertainment-value bug.
Still, people do wonder about the population, worrying that the twinkling twilights of their youth might be fading to oblivion.
The Washington Post recently reported that residents of the nation's capital were glorying in the best and brightest firefly season in several years, after years of worry that lawn pesticides and sprawling concrete had taken a toll.
“We were a little worried,” said Michael Raupp, a professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, “but they seem to be back in force.”
Burk said that in his 27 years in Omaha, he's detected no general firefly decline in the region. Maybe the summer show nowadays doesn't match those of a half-century ago, he said, but that also might be a romanticizing of childhood.
A moist spring can help fireflies, he said. They have few predators to worry about, because they are poisonous.
On the other hand, a cold winter with little snow hurts, because the firefly larvae are trying to survive in the top layer of soil. The effects of other factors, such as diseases, have not been extensively researched, he said.
“In heavily urbanized areas, there probably is a downward trend,” Burk said, but Omaha doesn't fit that description. In fact, he said, the metro area's suburbs generally fit the firefly's idea of heaven: lots of lawns dotted with occasional shrubbery.
The downside of paradise, from the firefly's perspective, is pesticides, particularly the broad-spectrum sort used to kill a fellow beetle, the white grub, in lawns, he said.
“We're kind of giving with one hand and taking with another,” he said.
Contact the writer:
444-1140, roger.buddenberg@owh.com
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