Maybe fireflies give primordial meaning to light my fire.
We’re almost at the time when the blinking lights of our common firefly, the big dipper (Photinus pyralis), will dot our evenings and bring the question of what those flashes mean.
“I’m curious about it, too!” emailed Orit Peleg, assistant professor at the University of Colorado. “Currently, we know that flashing is linked to mating and warning signals. However, there could be more delicate variations within these contexts and potentially broader uses that we do not know about, yet. Since fireflies exist as flashing adults for only a few weeks out of the entire year, researchers need to be at the right time and the right place to study them. This makes the study of fireflies challenging.”
Peleg is taking on the challenge over the next five years with the help of $900,000, received earlier this year from a National Science Foundation CAREER award, to learn how fireflies in a swarm synchronize their lighting displays.
I look forward to seeing what she finds out.
Peleg seems like the right person. She has a multidisciplinary background: B.S. in physics and computer science and an M.S. in physics from Bar-Ilan University in Israel; a Ph.D. in material science at ETH Zurich. She’s a member of the Biofrontiers Institute and Department of Computer Science and studies animal communication with “her lab by merging tools from physics, biology, math and computer science.”
On a personal level, she took a different path to fireflies.
“I actually grew up in a place where fireflies are not abundant and never saw them in my childhood!” she emailed. “I love hearing about other’s childhood memories of running around forests with fireflies. I get to do that a bit, as an adult, as part of my lab’s research. What drew me to fireflies was learning about their beauty and behavior from books, articles, and nature documentaries.
“As a physicist and computer scientist, I’m fascinated by the (seemingly) simple communication signal fireflies have evolved to use: a sequence of flashes, long and short, a bit like Morse code, and probably as close as it gets to computer languages in the animal kingdom. We have a lot more to discover about their communication system.”
Considering the Chicago area seems headed for a drought, I wondered if weather impacts the communications of fireflies. She replied that especially moisture and temperature did.
“Most firefly species rely on having a moist environment. Some even concentrate on/near water bodies [1],” she emailed. “Ambient temperature can alter the flash pattern of some firefly species, making them flash slower (low temperatures), or faster (high temperatures) [2,3]. This is crucial because each species of flashing firefly has a unique flash pattern (used for mating recognition). As temperature changes, some patterns might start overlapping.”
The wise guy in me suggests that’s common to mates of many species.
The science guy in me wondered if the light pollution impacts firefly communication.
“Yes, light pollution impacts firefly communication [1], but please note that this is not the focus of my lab’s work,” she emailed. “Avalon Owens and Sara Lewis recently published careful experiments [4] showing that fireflies need dark environments to communicate.”
Learn more about that from The New York Times.
The obvious next question is what can a concerned citizen do.
“Yes, lots you could do!” she emailed. “Avoid pesticide use, turn off your outdoor lights at night, participate in a community science project, etc.”
Here’s another project those of us who do pollinator plantings: work on light pollution at home. There are overlaps. She pointed to the recommendations from The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
References:
[1] https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/2/157/5715071
[2] Faust, Lynn Frierson (2017). “Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs”
[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add6690
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/science/firefly-light-mating.html
