On a dark night in the forest, I met the goddess of youth

Washington Post

3 days ago

I'm on a Civil War battlefield in West Virginia late on a dark night, and I've got the Heebie-Jeebies.
At least I hope I do.
'So, that could be a Heebie-Jeebie,' reports my guide for the evening, Krista Noe, an ecologist with West Virginia's Division of Natural Resources. She and her colleagues are on a mission to identify all the firefly species in the state. They are at 29 — and counting.
She is pointing out a faint, yellowish flash every second or so near a clump of trees. 'Probably a Heebie,' she says.
She steps into the brush, flushing a rabbit or some other small animal from its bed, and counts the flashes out loud. After 11 uninterrupted flashes, she has no doubt.
'These ones, they're Heebies,' Noe confirms.
We have already seen the Big Dipper and the Spring 4-Flasher, the July Comet and the Creekside Tree Blinker (though a dissection might show that they are actually Little Grays). The ones flashing in the trees, too high to examine, are probably Photuris tremulans — Christmas Lights — and the ones lower down and glowing bluish-green are Chinese Lanterns.
We stand in the forest for more than two hours, watching the bioluminescent mating display: yellow and green, bright and subtle, fast and slow, twinkling and flashing. First, at dusk, we met Photinus pyralis, the common eastern firefly whose J-stroke flash pattern earns them their 'Big Dipper' nickname. In suburban backyards and urban parks, these are the ones children have captured in jars for generations. Here in the woods in great abundance, they give the impression that we are surrounded by fairies.
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Later come the Chinese Lanterns, with their ghostly pulsing, and the female Photuris fireflies. These femmes fatales lure the males of other species by mimicking the flashes of their mates — and then eat them to steal the protective chemicals they produce, called lucibufagins.
For Noe and her colleague, entomologist Jakob Goldner, the night is a disappointment. They were hoping to find a species, seen in this spot three years ago, that is so rare they don't want me to name it in print. But it hasn't shown up. 'Another year of getting skunked,' Noe says.
Krista Noe, an ecologist with West Virginia's Division of Natural Resources, inspects a firefly. (Ken Cedeno/For The Washington Post)
For me, however, it is an enchanting evening. There are few things more soothing than sitting on the porch on my farm at night, watching the fireflies. But to be in the forest with scientists — fireflyers, they call themselves — is to discover a fireworks show more intricate than any human-produced pyrotechnics. Each species — there are more than 125 identified in North America and more than 2,200 in the world — has a distinctive flash pattern, color and timing. And then there are the names: Luminous Ghost. Davis's Oddball. Sneaky Elf. Wiggle Dancer. Texas Hooker.
The star of the night for me, if only because of its name, is the Heebie-Jeebie, Photuris hebes. Found on the Potomac River near Great Falls a century ago, it is named for the Greek goddess of youth.
In one sense, it's odd to associate any firefly with youth, for by the time we see them lighting up our nights, they are already at the end of their lives. They live for up to two years as larvae, but once they take flight, they have just a few weeks to mate before they die. Most don't even eat during their short time aloft.
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But these aged flyers, by burning brightly at life's end, have a way of transporting us back to our childhoods. 'It's impossible to be outside at night and see fireflies and not feel joy and wonder and excitement, and this connection to your inner child,' says Candace Fallon, a conservation biologist — and fireflyer — with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. 'I mean, you'll have a bunch of adults, biologists out in the field together, and suddenly everyone is squealing with excitement as fireflies burst into light.'
The firefly restores us in more tangible ways, too. The substances that make it glow — the enzyme luciferase and the substrate luciferin — have for decades been used to keep our food supply safe, because they identify microbial contamination. More recently, they have helped to screen new cancer treatments and aided genetics research by reporting when genes turn on and off. There is also hope that the firefly's lucibufagin, a toxin that deters predators, could be used to kill cancer cells. 'Fireflies are a great example of how evolution's creative tinkering has gifted us with so many really, really useful tools and technologies,' says Sara Lewis, co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Firefly Specialist Group.
This is why we need to care about the rapid decline of insect populations in recent years, often referred to as the insect apocalypse, even if we don't care about insects for their own sake. Of the 1.2 million animal species known to science (several times that number remain unidentified), about 80 percent are insects. Many of those, like fireflies, could contain miracle cures for humans and for the planet, developed over hundreds of millions of years. But if habitat loss, pesticides and artificial light push them into extinction before their secrets are known, their cures will die with them.
'If insects begin to disappear from various ecosystems on the Earth, it's a serious problem — not just for those ecosystems, but for all of those future medical breakthroughs that we're losing, things that could have been discovered that we will never see again,' says Lewis, a Tufts University biology professor emerita. 'Insects are endlessly inventive. They're small and a lot of things want to eat them, so they have evolved to be very well protected against losing their lives.' They could also protect our lives, and they could be the goddess Hebe for generations unborn — but only if we don't kill them first.
Krista Noe records data while she and other ecologists survey the firefly community in West Virginia. (Ken Cedeno/For The Washington Post)
It is a lament so common as to be universal: There just aren't as many fireflies as there were when I was a kid. But is it true?
Nobody has been tracking firefly populations long enough to know for sure. But studies of individual species of fireflies and glowworms point to a decline, as does common sense: If insects are declining almost across the board, fireflies shouldn't be immune. In 2021, researchers found that 14 percent of firefly species in North America are threatened with extinction, while 53 percent of species could not be evaluated because of insufficient data.
But part of the perceived disappearance of fireflies might have less to do with them than with us. We simply don't spend as much time outdoors as we used to. 'We have all these devices now, and screens and lights. How often do any of us really go out at night after dark and just hang out and see what's out there?' asks Fallon. 'Perhaps the fireflies are there, but we're just not noticing them. I'm finding that, especially in the West, where I do a lot of my firefly fieldwork, folks are adamant that there aren't fireflies in places like Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New Mexico. And we go out there at the right time of year, the right time of night, and we find them.'
Both of these problems — the apparent decline of fireflies and the loss of our outdoor time — can be solved. Please: Quit the insecticides and buy your food from producers that don't use them. Don't cut your lawn as often or as short, because that's where fireflies and other insects hide during the day. And shut off your outside lights, particularly those with bright-white LED bulbs; they are bad for all insects but particularly those that use light to communicate with one another. 'If you've got a lot of streetlamps and porch lights, the fireflies don't flash at all,' observes Ariel Firebaugh, a fireflyer with the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm. And if they don't flash, they don't reproduce.
After you've killed the lights, go outside and watch the show that inspired the poets and delighted our ancestors. (But hurry: They'll only be with us this year for a couple more weeks.) For centuries, cultures across the globe have alternately viewed fireflies as symbols of passion and spirits of the dead. Even today, tens of thousands attend firefly displays in Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan. In this country, thousands enter a lottery in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a chance to view synchronous fireflies that flash in unison: six times, every six seconds.
A long-exposure photo shows fireflies on Longgang Trail in Keelung, Taiwan, on May 7, 2024. (I-Hwa Cheng/AFP/Getty Images)
Those in the Midwest prefer the term 'lightning bugs,' those in the West say 'fireflies,' and most of the country uses both. In fact, they are neither flies nor true bugs, but beetles of the Lampyridae family. All firefly larvae are glowworms, but not all glowworms are fireflies; the bioluminescent railroad worm, which looks like train tracks in the dark, is one such exception. Further complicating matters, some fireflies, such as the Winter Firefly, produce no light. The Photinus genus tends to have yellow lights, the Photuris genus tends to be green, the Pyractomena appear orange, and Phausis can look blue — but here, too, there are exceptions.
The only consistent thing, it seems, is that fireflies' light shows are all about sex. Males, which outnumber their potential mates, do most of the flashing we see as they vie to be selected by the relatively scarce females. Lewis writes that, among Big Dippers, 'as many as 20 rival males will surround a single female, creating a writhing love knot.' Even after the female chooses the male she likes the best, 'several of the losing males often pile on top of the happy couple, stacking themselves up to six deep.'
Sitting on my porch, I had no idea such a scandal was unfolding before me.
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I took a couple of firefly walks this summer, at the Clifton Institute in Warrenton, Virginia (where co-director Eleanor Harris led us to a stunning show of Christmas Light fireflies) and at the Blandy farm in Boyce, Virginia (where a Big Dipper hitched a ride on my daughter's hand).
For a more intensive immersion, I persuaded Noe and Goldner to take me on one of their firefly surveys. Rural West Virginia offers some ideal habitat for the critters ('If you look at a light pollution map, there's a sort of West Virginia hole,' Goldner notes) and in the five years state scientists have been doing the surveys (using federal wildlife grants), they have found the same Synchronous Firefly that draws big crowds to Tennessee, and they've been chasing other novelties such as the Blue Ghost, the Shadow Ghost, the Snappy Single Sync and a cool-weather species, Photinus aquilonius.
At this spot in eastern West Virginia, they typically find about six species, which is what we find tonight. After the initial fairy storm of Big Dippers at dusk, things calm down in the forest.
But soon, Noe is stalking a new species. She records its yellow flashes, which come every few seconds, by making a 'tss' sound on a voice recorder so she can tell exactly how far apart the flashes are. When she's got that, she grabs her butterfly net and, with a smooth flick of the wrist, captures one. 'Got her,' she says. But it's a him: Photinus sabulosus, the Creekside Tree Blinker, with a peach-colored head and small, pinkish lanterns.
He is not pleased with the situation: He fires off an alarm flash and secretes some lucibufagins on Noe's finger.
Fireflies are seen on July 1 in a wooded area of West Virginia, where a team of ecologists is surveying the insects as part of a long-term monitoring effort. Photographer's note: Numerous images are stacked on top of one another so that many fireflies can be viewed in a single frame. (Ken Cedeno/For The Washington Post)
An hour after dusk, the first Photuris species of the night — the Christmas Lights, Noe suspects — make their appearance in the treetops. Adding to the show, the July Comets start streaking about. A couple of times, she and Goldner think they might have found one of the rare species — 'We've got eyes on something,' Noe calls out — but both times she decides 'it's too slow, and it's inconsistent.' These are the femmes fatales: Photuris females trying to lure males to their deaths by trickery.
At one point, Noe spots something different. 'Oop! There's one over there. Right in front of us. There's — oop! See, there's one down there. Oop! There's one right there. Oop! Single flashes. Oop! There's one on the — oop! Right there. Oop!'
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This is something I've never seen before. She's pointing out flashes that burn brightly, then fade slowly, like a cigar end. These are the Chinese Lanterns, a still-undefined complex of species also called 'Low Slow Glows.' They are ghostly and exquisite.
'You get a bunch of species doing that slow glow, and it's just ethereal,' Noe says. 'You can't see it, but I'm getting chills.'
It's nearing 11 p.m. when I return to my car — and find that it won't start. It'll be hours before I get it fixed and make my way home, but even this doesn't break my equanimity. I've been restored by the goddess Hebe.