Here come real stars to fill the upper skies/
And here on Earth come emulating flies
- "Fireflies in the Garden," Robert Frost
We see them flash in the warm Carolina twilight, shining light on the impermanence of a season and igniting the child within us that longs for summer to last forever.
They speak a silent language – a language of survival and procreation, to each other and to us – just above finely manicured suburban lawns and misty pastures at the edge of the woods.
Their demure discourse embodies the essence of the summer evenings we are fortunate to share with them.
Elegant. Amorous. Fleeting.
They glow with blithe abandon in their search for as many summer flings as their short lives allow, with little concern for whatever predator might be on the their luminescent tails – a spider stalking on a web or an infatuated 5-year-old anxiously fumbling with a Mason jar.
Ecstasy is their birthright, their purpose. And their light is the beacon to it.
Fireflies. Lightning bugs. Hotaru.
The luminous nymphs of summer.
They have served as the muses of the ancients and contemporaries and those in between, from east of Kansas to South America to Europe to India to Japan to Indonesia.
They provide a link between parent and child; between generations, unbreakable as long as nature runs its course.
Firefly lights/
Even the frog's mouth gapes
- Kobayashi Issa, 18th century Japanese Haiku master.
Crystal Stewart saw her first firefly when she was 9. She had come from California to visit her grandmother in South Carolina during the summer. There are no fireflies in the American West. Scientists aren't sure why.
"Of all the summers of my childhood, I remember that one," says the 31-year-old mother of three, who for more than 20 years now has lived here, where lightning bugs can, when the time is right, flash in a virtual galaxy of light. "The thick grass, walking barefoot in the grass, the fireflies flashing all over it at sundown. I remember that like it was yesterday."
It was yesterday. And every summer yesterday that passes near the solstice, when fireflies emerge from the ground, flash in an exotic dance to attract a mate and die a mere few weeks after.
"What do you do with the fireflies?" Crystal asks her 3-year-old son, Colby.
He casts a wide smile and quickly clasps his hands together: "I catch 'em!"
"It's a sign that summer is here," Crystal says. "I'm sure my kids will be chasing fireflies with their kids, too."
And so it goes.
Fireflies are as ubiquitous as iced tea here in the South, where "lightning bug" is the preferred terminology (why else would we venture into the humid summer evening and brave the vampiric mosquitoes?).
Fireflies are an ageless wonder that crosses oceans, time and culture.
In England, fireflies are known as glow worms (likely referring to females, the only ones who flash, yet don't have wings like males).
The creatures surely inspired Shakespeare as he envisioned his fairies in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
"And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes/To have my love to bed and to arise," the nymph queen instructs her mystic servants.
Fireflies permeate poems and prose through the ages – particularly in Japanese art in the form of haikus, novels and music, says Yoshiki Chikuma, assistant professor of Japanese studies at the College of Charleston.
School graduation ceremonies in Japan are often performed to the song "Hotaru no Hikari," which means "fireflies' light." Cities often celebrate with firefly festivals.
"Japanese people appreciate things that signify the brevity of life," Chikuma says, "perhaps because they have been surrounded by natural disasters such as earthquakes and typhoons for generations. Japanese people find beauty in fireflies because their life is short, but when they are alive they are so beautiful."
The past is beautiful/
Like the darkness between the fireflies
- Mason Jennings, contemporary folk musician
Among the mysteries of fireflies is a constant: The magic can't be bottled.
Heidi Mathis has lived in South Carolina all 33 years of her life. She remembers as a little girl playing kickball as the summer sun slowly gave way to shadows.
Then, they would begin to emerge one here, another one there.
The children in the neighborhood would watch them dip and flash, leaving a residual streak of light. Fireflies are lumbering creatures. In the twilight, they are easily caught.
The patience of a child to passively admire never lasts long.
Into the jar they would go, carefully as their tiny legs tickled the fingers and left the slightest sticky residue. The hope was that, all together under the glass, they would somehow unite in a dazzling display, perhaps light the room with a friendly glow at bedtime.
But they didn't. And they don't. Only against the canvas of darkness, only in the pursuit of a purpose, do they truly enchant us.
Once in the jar, Heidi says, "They were just bugs, then."
Let my love, like sunlight, surround you/
And yet give you illumined freedom
- "Fireflies," Rabindranath Tagore, late-20th century Indian poet
Even to biologists dedicated to the calculated analysis of the world's insects, fireflies stand out as more than "just bugs." They fascinate in a unique way, one that melds the deliberate scientific method and the pursuit of the ethereal.
Amazingly, the energy a firefly creates in its bioluminescent rear end is almost completely transformed into light, whereas a light bulb wastes 90 percent of its energy as heat, says Eric Benson, a Clemson University entomologist.
If we could find a way to produce cold energy like a firefly, Benson says, we'd have made a grand breakthrough.
Benson understands the folklore of fireflies – that, much like how life once seemed simpler and slower, there once seemed to be more fireflies.
The reality is, though, there are more fireflies to be seen this year in South Carolina (home to as many as 30 species) than we've seen in awhile. The wet weather of spring likely played a part in a marked swell of firefly activity, he says.
"There always seem to be good years and bad years," Benson says. "This is a pretty good year. People say they don't see as many, but I don't know if people try as hard."
There is much to see, if we leave our air-conditioned dens to look closely.
Sara Lewis, one of America's leading firefly researchers, describes the subject of her lifelong passion as "perfectly magical."
The sole purpose of an adult firefly – actually, Lewis says, it's a form of beetle of which there are more than 100 known species in the United States and more than 2,000 worldwide – is to reproduce.
During adulthood, which lasts only a few weeks, some species don't even bother eating.
The sexes find each other in a symbiotic dance of bioluminescence, a function believed to be the product of a delicate chemical reaction between an enzyme, luciferin, and oxygen.
While pulse patterns aren't fully understood, Lewis says, in one particular species males with longer pulses are believed to be more capable of providing a female with a nutrient that will help to better develop her eggs.
Lewis and her colleagues at Tufts University in Massachusettes are currently studying the flash patterns of other species to see if this is a constant, or possibly a trick employed to con a female into romance by mimicking the flashes of competitors of other species who are considered more virile.
During the mating process, females perch on low-lying vegetation awaiting the signal of any number of males. The males, she says, take flight as dusk sets in, hovering three to six feet above the ground advertising their availability with a flash pattern of one, two or several short light pulses.
Females respond with a single pulse. The flashing continues until a male finds his mate, often attracting other males in the process.
As hunters, we can observe the flash patterns of fireflies and mimic them with a small penlight to attract a male or woo a female into flashing her approval.
While adults are conspicuous, most of a firefly's life is spent underground.
In North America, Lewis says, they can spend anywhere from a few months to as long as three years in the ground as larvae, depending on how cold the climate, before they emerge in the summer.
Once a female is done mating, she will lay eggs in moist soil or moss. The eggs glow, it is believed, to warn predators that a victim isn't likely to sit well in the stomach.
In fact, many species of firefly release a noxious chemical when they are in distress; in one particular species, a femme fatale will mimic the pulse of another species to attract and eat a male to gain the chemical she lacks, for her own use.
After about two weeks, the eggs hatch and tiny larvae emerge and dig underground, eating mostly earthworms, snails and slugs. When the time is right, when the air is alive, they take flight.
Their light guides their passion and inspires ours.
We shine with them.
