Stuff You Should Know - How Fireflies and Lightning Bugs Work

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Whether called fireflies, lightning bugs, or glow worms, the tiny, bioluminescent bugs that light up the evening are universally beloved. Which makes their sudden and swift decline very distressing. Listen to find out how you – YOU – can save the firefly. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there and it's with the two of us. And we are here today to present new stuff you should know about Fireflies and Lightning Bugs, which are pretty much one and the same. I assume you're a Firefly guy, right?

I'm both. I vacillate. I'm a vacillator. Really? I'll say it again. I vacillate. That's weird. I don't know many people that kind of interchange these.

Well, I grew up in Toledo and I think that's where I picked up Lightning Bug and then down here in the south, it's Firefly, right? You got a backward sun. Well, then I picked up Firefly as a kid in Lightning Bug in the south. That's it. Yeah. I mean, I'm obviously born and raised here forever. I just can't imagine saying Fireflies.

It just seems very strange to me. Yeah. It makes you think of like arsonists? No, it makes me think of brown coats in the TV show. Okay. Sure. That was a good TV show. Yeah.

I mean, that's a good thing to think about for sure. But yeah, that's the deal apparently. In the south, it's Lightning Bugs generally. I think Firefly out west and northeast and then Midwest and south is Lightning Bug generally. Yeah. Generally. There are pockets here, there are weirdos who call them other things like jack-o-lantern bugs and stuff like that.

But most people see Fireflies in Lightning Bugs as like synonymous and interchangeable. But apparently there's a group of Firefly researchers that differentiate where they use Fireflies as like the umbrella term for a few other categories. Right. There's the glow worm of which the ladies don't have wings and they have a steady glow. They're big in the UK, huge. Like big in size or just popular? Popular is basically what I mean.

They're like three feet long. Then you've got your daytime dark Fireflies, which just get this out of here if you ask me. I know, it's sad. Yeah, they don't even have light. So I even throw the word Firefly in there. They ruin it for everybody else. That's the problem with using genetics for taxonomy.

Right. And then you've got your flashing Firefly and that's what we're talking about here, which is the Lightning Bug. Yeah, that's where it's interchangeable. Flashing Firefly, Lightning Bug, one and the same. And we're not going to be pedantic from this point on, but I felt like that was worth pointing out. No, I agree.

Well, we're going to be a little pedantic one more time. I guess you're right. I forgot because Fireflies aren't flies. Lightning Bugs aren't bugs. And there's quite a few little facts of the podcast that you can know. I know. This is one of those, I think, where people don't know a lot about Lightning Bugs, so they can always delight their friends at their next backyard party by saying, they're actually

all Beatles. That's right. And everybody will be like, what? Oh my God, you just won the party. Oh man, I haven't won a party in so long. It's been a while, I haven't been to a party in so long. Even long before the pandemic, I stopped getting invited. Is that really?

Sure. It's because you won too many parties. I guess so. People like you can't have Josh. He's a rigger. It was like having Simone Biles over for a gymnastics party. What? I don't get that one.

The goat thing. I don't get the goat thing. She's the greatest of all time with the gymnastics. I'm saying I'm the greatest of all time with party winning with facts. I have goats that live across the street and I literally just fed them, so my mind went to the animal, so I didn't get it. Yes, all about Simone Biles, she's great. Okay.

Take care of herself. I love it. Yeah, sure. So. No, I'm sorry that sounded like I was ambivalent. I agree with you. I think it is good that she took care of herself. I agree too.

Well, you said it first, obviously you agree with yourself. Should we cut all that out? No, I think stuffy should know gold. We haven't had some weirdo exchange for a while. It's been a while. All right, can we get back to Lightning Bugs for the love of God? Their class, oh boy, here we go. I'm going to say the order Coleoptera.

I think you just nailed it. You just won the pronunciation party. You want to try the family? I've been trying to figure this out. I think it's Lampyridae. I think that's about right. Because pyro like fire, like the bright, it could also be Lampyridae. It's one of those two.

That's what I'm sticking my claim on. I'm going to vacillate between Lampyridae and Lampyridae. All right, but all together in this order and family, there are here in the North American continent, there are more than 170 species and more than 2,000 worldwide and they're always discovering more species, not always, but they're still discovering like every day. They're discovering more species, so that list grows and grows. Yeah, which is pretty cool, especially considering that they are dropping like flies as far as anecdotal evidence is concerned, including anecdotal evidence from me.

Yeah, me too, which we'll get to, very disappointing. So the thing about fireflies is since they're a beetle family, most of them are all winged beetles. Almost all of them are. Like you said, some like glow worms are typically include females that don't have wings, but for the most part, they have wings, they fly around and like winged beetles, they have certain parts, in particular, the Elytria, Elytria, Elytria, I would say Elytria or Elytria. Okay, and that is very cool little closure that like, they're like bay doors that open

and close on the back of the firefly to allow the wings to spread out to take flight. It's really neat. It's like a DeLorean. Yeah, it is a lot, or like the Tesla SUV. Oh, did they open like that? Yes. That's so showy. It's pretty cool though, man.

What is it about those doors? I don't know. Yeah, I know. I also love the old Lamborghini ones that would slide open. Ever since I was eight, something about doors like that or just tickle me. And they, yes, those encase the wings and protect them. And then they also have an encased head. It's called a pernotum, and that's the covering over basically the entire head.

So if you're looking on from a bird's eye view, you're just going to see, no, you're going to see any face. Yeah, it's just like a protective covering. It's like, you know, Jerry only from the misfits. It's like that get up that he wears that covers the back of his neck and head. I don't think I've seen that. Yeah. And it has spikes.

And I can tell you that Yumi has been impaled briefly on one of those spikes at that show. That Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein invited us to Madison Square Garden. Yes, but it definitely caught our attention because those things are not for show, man. The spikes are very pointy. And they're metal. Yes. Okay. I didn't know if it was like Guar and it's all like foam.

No. No. It's like Guar was apparently doing like a model of what Jerry only was wearing all these years. Whoa. Yeah. All right. How big are these things?

What did we settle on? I know you sent an update, but is that just because it was incorrect or because seven sixteenths of an inch makes no sense to anyone? Well, it said that they range in size from like seven sixteenths of an inch to nine sixteenths of an inch. It's specifically like the Big Dipper Firefly. Fireflies in general typically range from about a fifth of an inch to an inch, typically like five to 25 millimeters, starting in about the size of a grain of rice all the way up

to an inch. But there's some that are like way bigger than that. Yeah. I mean, there are some that can be as big as the palm of your hand, but here in the United States is good old American ones. You know how big they are. They're about as big as a fingernail. That's right.

And when they fly around, they go, I'm going to squirt some light on you and you. And speaking of them squirting light, just last thing about their body, the organ, the light organ in their abdomen or tail is called the lantern, which I think is awesome. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. So where do you find, besides backyards in the suburbs, where do you find Fireflies, Charles?

Well, you can find them on any continent, except of course, Antarctica, I feel like we say that a lot, poor Antarctica. They are going to be in tropical regions, temperate zones. You're going to see them, it depends on what stage they're in, the stage that we all love, the adult stage. It's only a couple of weeks long when they're flying around and lighting up their bellies. But mainly, and we'll get to their life cycle, they spend most of their time as larvae on the ground, on the forest floor, kind of near water usually.

The larval stage, they look like little, almost like little dinosaur caterpillars. They're really interesting looking and they look nothing like you would think if you're used to seeing like these Fireflies fly around. Yeah. Especially, I mean, Fireflies just seem so like mild-mannered and almost kind of dopey to some extent when they're flying around. No, when they're in the larval stages, we'll see their holy terrors basically. Yeah.

But they have all sorts of different habitats, you can find them up in the southern provinces of Canada, you can find them in some arid areas. As long as there is permanent water, you could conceivably have Firefly populations and even like just perpetually moist areas too. It doesn't have to be like a pond or something, but moist, like real moist areas. Yeah, and you're going to see them in the humid summer evenings generally in the south. It can be hot all year long, so you can see them some in the fall as well. Some though, like there are outliers, like you said, some of them are really super aquatic

and some of them like never come down from their trees. These are the ones of the 2,000 species all over the world that we're talking about. If you are looking for a Firefly show, the best seasons that you're going to have Firefly shows are after a warm wet spring or even during a warm wet spring and or after a mild winter because those larvae that live in those marshy areas will have higher survival rates in a colder climate with a mild winter during the overwintering period. All right. I think that's a great setup.

Sure. Let's get started. Maybe we should take a break and reveal to everyone what the heck they're doing with those lanterns to begin with, huh? I think so. All right. We'll be right back. Hey, friends.

When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now, the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

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Okay, Chuck, we're about to act as Lucifer to all these people because we will be bringing light to understanding of how fireflies produce light. Being appropriately Luciferase. Right. And I guess we can go ahead and since I promised a big reveal, they're doing all this to attract a mate. They're trying to get down and boogie with another lightning bug. That's why they're lighting up like that.

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I forgot about the reveal in the one and a half seconds between your cliffhanger and us coming back. Yeah. I think people think we leave for 120 seconds and just go, you know, take a stretch or whatever. We just sit there in silence for 120 seconds. That's what it's going to be. Jerry won't let us talk.

So yeah, they're lighting up to attract a mate. And what they're doing here, they have these specialized cells in their abdomen to make that lantern light up. And it contains, like you said, that chemical called Luciferin. Sure. And it makes an enzyme called Luciferase. If you don't want to sound devilish about it, that would be a fine pronunciation. I like Luciferin.

Luciferin. Luciferase. But they need something else too, right? They need oxygen to make that thing blaze. Yeah. That and adenosine triphosphate or ATP, which is that chemically stored energy that's found in basically all cells of all life everywhere. Yeah.

Talk about that a lot. Yeah. It's just kind of this ubiquitous thing that kind of makes, it's what powers life. So when it all kind of combines where you have oxygen and ATP and Luciferin and Luciferase, the enzyme that's produced by Luciferin, this chemical reaction produces light. There's a couple of byproducts, oxaluciferin and adenosine monophosphate. And then light's given off. And you would think like, okay, light and heat, sure, that's the chemical reaction.

So it's going to produce some heat, no, absolutely not. Here's one of those facts of the podcast, in my opinion. They call the kind of light that fireflies produce, the kind of bioluminescence that fireflies produce, cold light, because it is 100% efficient. None of that, the energy released from that chemical reaction is lost to heat. It is all, it just produces photons only. Yeah. That's why children can let a lightning bug land on their finger and that little abdomen,

that lantern can light up on their finger and they don't go owl and smash it. Yeah, try that with a sparkler. Don't do that. It doesn't work. The light is the actual light in the wavelength is between 510 and 670 nanometers. It looks yellowish. To me, it looks a little greenish, described as reddish green, but it looks like a yellowish green to me.

It depends on the species, I think. Yeah, yeah. I think there's ones that even give off blue, right? Yeah, there's some around Asheville called the blue ghost firefly. And from a distance, they look blue, but up close, if you catch one and hold it in your hand, it's like a greenish thing. So it has something to do with the distance that makes it look blue, but I saw pictures of those things.

I was like, oh, I want to go see those one day. Asheville's a nice weekend trip. Sure. It's beautiful up there. You guys ever go up there? No. No. No.

We went a couple of years ago. It's great. Go to the, what's it called, the big house. Sure. Who's its name? I don't know why I'm blanking. The Biltmore State. The Biltmore State.

Yeah, but there's also the mountains around their need and the town itself has a lot of great restaurants. It's wonderful. If you're eating vegan food, you could do a lot worse than Asheville, you know? Or craft beer or homemade chocolate. Just don't go to the Biltmore house during Christmas unless, well, I just think it's better non-Christmas. The Christmas is so done there that I feel like it obscures a lot of the beauty of their

Biltmore house. And that kind of Christmas stuff that they put up is not my style. It's just a lot. Is it like the Belk style of Christmas? Yeah. Lots of gold ribbons. Lots of gold ribbons. Yeah.

I am with you. I'm with you. It's not my thing. And the Biltmore stands on its own. It doesn't need all that garbage. But that's just my opinion. You're like, I like my Christmas gaudy. Plus, you don't get the gardens that you would, that's just me.

We made the big mistake of going there on Christmas one time. Never happened again. It was the worst mistake. It was the worst. Ever made. And I hit a drifter once with my car. Here's another cool fact of the show, I think, is that the lightning bugs all have gout, or they could very well have gout, because those cells that make that light are riddled

with uric acid crystals, just like you have as a human with gout. But they do it because they are crystals to reflect that light away from their little abdomen. Yeah. And the lenses they used in Robert Eggers' Masterpiece the Lighthouse. Yeah. Oh, boy. What a movie.

Yeah. I just wanted to slide a reference in. And in order to get that oxygen, we've been saying it needs oxygen. You're probably like, well, how in the world do they get it? It is not just gathered through the air. It actually goes through a tube in the abdomen called the abdominal trachea, which is very interesting. We're not exactly sure if fireflies are able to turn the supply of oxygen on or off.

It's almost like how it would inject fuel into a combustion engine. They are injecting oxygen into their luciferase engine and producing light with it, but they don't know if they can use nerves to turn it on and off, or if they're just subject to the whims of oxygen availability. We just don't know at this point. We just don't. Now, here's how I understand this next bit. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but they use this chemical reaction that happens in

fireflies to produce that bioluminescence. They can use that. We said that ATP, like every animal on the planet has ATP, but if you have cell damage, maybe you might not have as much, or if it's diseased, you may not have enough. Do they actually use this bioluminescence to inject in the cells to see if they get that glowy reaction that they're looking for? Yeah. They use it for that to make sure that the cells have an expected amount of ATP to locate

cells that don't have enough ATP, because that would suggest there's some sort of problem going on there. Then also, they figured out how to attach the luciferin gene to other genes using, I believe, CRISPR, which ties into our optogenetics episode, where they're using the light that's produced by this bioluminescence to turn on and off nearby genes, which is nuts. The thing I saw that this luciferase was used for most abundantly, especially in the 20th century, was to detect spoilage in food, like milk, because if you had bacteria growing in your milk, if you added luciferase, the milk would start to glow because the luciferase

would interact with the ATP in those bacterial cells, and you would know you needed to pour some bleach in with your milk. Right. No, don't ever do that. Don't ever drink glowing milk, and don't ever pour bleach and drink it in anything. But apparently, we humans have no problems ingesting and working with luciferase. It doesn't do anything bad to our bodies as far as we know, which is pretty interesting. All right.

Now, I know everyone's like, this is all great, chemical reactions and stuff, but we'd really love to talk about the sexy stuff, because anytime we talk about animals and insects, we always get to talk about sexy stuff, which is a lot of fun. It's basically our only outlet. It really is, except when we blush our way through episodes on puberty and stuff. Or see a good pair of gullwing doors open up on a car. Right. And of course, puberty isn't sexy stuff.

I hope that didn't come across. Right. I think that was a good save. So when they're flashing, like we said, it is a mating ritual, and it is usually the male flashing their light high above the sky, or high above the yard, in the sky, to show off to females who are on the ground, kind of sitting around, having a glass of wine, and they're watching the light show, and they're like, what do you think of that one, Marge? And they're like, well, he looks okay, so let me flash back.

And they'll flash back, and then the male will see that, and they'll say, hey, she just swiped, I don't know if it's left or right, but in the correct direction. And let me go down and see if we can have a little party for the next few hours. Yeah, because that's how long they couple. And by couple, I mean like have sex. They stick together for like an hour or multiple hours, Chuck, which is pretty impressive. Agreed. Yeah.

An hour to three hours, that's great. Good for them. Right. I'm really happy for them. Here's the cool thing, too, though, is each species has its own little blinky pattern, because they want to mate with the appropriate match, and so they're going to send out their blinky pattern. In some places around the world, they are synchronous.

I think Southeast Asia has the only like really, really, truly synchronous lightning bugs in that they all blink in unison, which really must be cool to see. Yeah. And messages like, come and get it. I guess so. All at once, like kind of in a creepy children of the damned tone. Other places I think they can synchronize, but they don't become like completely synchronous as a unit, right?

No. I mean, they will like in little localized areas and for a few seconds only, and you've probably seen this and didn't necessarily recognize what you're looking at, but this is like when I thought about it, I was like, I was having trouble understanding it from the written description, and I thought about it and thought about it. I sat down for a little while, thought about it some more, and finally I was like, yeah, of course. I mean, that's just a given.

And then I finally was like, okay, I think I got this, and I think I've seen this before, where you'll just see a few fireflies that start to kind of like fall into a rhythm, and then they fall out of the rhythm after a few flashes. That's still considered synchronous. Give them a break. Yeah. They're trying their best. Right.

They have an oxygen abdomen trachea for the love of God. So yeah. Well, one of the things I saw though that I thought was like really, really interesting is as we'll see when we talk about what they eat, most of the adults that you see flying around either don't eat or maybe eat plant stuff like nectar and pollen, but there's this one kind of firefly, which is actually pretty abundant in North America. The Photaurus species, where the female of the species will actually mimic the female of a rival species, Photinus, right?

And they'll attract males from the other species, the Photinus species to come over thinking that they're going to mate, and then what they find out is that, oh wait, this is the one female of the one species that is actually going to eat me, that is actually predatory against other fireflies, and now I'm dead. Yeah. They're tricksters because the male Photaurus can also imitate another male Photinus to attract a female of its own species. So she shows up thinking that she might have food, and he's like, oh no, it's time to get

down and boogie. That's right. And then beyond that, Chuck, it goes even one more level deeper because they are pretty sure, and there's this really great website called firefly.org. It's run by a guy named Ben Pfeiffer from what I understand. He seems to be quite dedicated to fireflies, but this is the only place I saw it, but he was saying that some researchers think that male Photurus, no, male Photinus, the ones that end up sometimes being food for female Photuruses, male Photinuses have figured out

how to put off bad flash patterns that make it look like a female Photurus impersonating a male Photinus to scare off other male Photinus fireflies so that it reduces competition for female Photinuses. It's kind of brain breaking. It really is, but this is apparently what the fireflies are doing with their time. That and getting down and boogying. Like we said, it's a few hours, one to three hours of that. And when this happens, the male is going to transfer his sperm packet to the female,

and they call this in the field of studying this in entomology. They call it a nuptial gift that the male gives a female. And this all occurs individually over, like we said, a few hours, but a few days total of mating that's going to happen usually in the spring, then the lady is going to lay her fertilized eggs either on the ground or just below the surface in the, maybe in some rotting logs or in, you know, multi sort of leaves and things like that, got to be moist. And then three to four weeks later, they're going to hatch out those little larvae who were going to live on the ground, terrorizing their neighbors for about two years.

Yeah. And in the meantime, mom and dad have gone off and died because they only live as adults for a few weeks, but you said it, those larvae live for two, up to two years is by far the longest part of the life cycle. And they are terrors of the miniature world down there. Yes. And they have mandibles and they inject their prey and paralyze them with neurotoxins. And then, and I know we've talked about some other insects that do this, they, they secrete

these enzymes that basically liquefy what they're trying to eat so they can just suck it up. It's like a Seth Brindle fly. Yeah, exactly. And then in that stage, they, they'll eat worms and worms will also eat them and return the favor, but they'll eat snails, they'll eat slugs, they'll eat other insects and they're just down there kind of wreaking havoc and then also trying not to get eaten. Yeah, because it goes both ways in that world.

And frogs apparently will eat Firefly larva pretty, pretty commonly. They'll also eat Firefly adults that land on the ground. I think snakes will eat Firefly adults on the ground. Some birds, I think ducks do, but it's not necessarily on purpose. They might just get swept up with some other actual duck food. They might caught up in the frenzy. Pretty much. And then fish also like to eat Firefly eggs and larvae that are like in marshy areas like

rice paddies or things like that. But apparently the, the, the most widespread and abundant predators against Firefly larva are spiders. Yes. But don't feel bad because Firefly larvae eat spiders as well and there are also some spiders that have learned like, you don't really want to eat a Firefly. I'm, I'm kind of scared of those things that turns out. Yeah.

So here's the deal. They, you know, when you see them flying around, they're flying around berries sort of lazily. They're lighting up their lanterns, broadcasting that they're out there. And the reason that they're broadcasting their presence is like you would think that that's not good. Like, oh, you know, a bird will swoop down and eat me because they clearly see me flying around.

It's actually a warning sign because they're not great flyers. They're not going to dodge you and outmaneuver you Maverick style in a dog fight. They're going to secrete these nasty, I guess they're toxins that are really, really bitter. They really kind of stink. I think if you're studying Fireflies and you have like thousands of them in a room, it can kind of be pretty stinky in there. Yeah. A nauseating odor when 10,000 to 20,000 are confined in a room.

Yeah. That was one researcher's quote. So what they do is, is they deliver this bitter, like I think they secrete a few drops of blood and it's just this toxic bitter taste that, you know, everything's eating them, but everything is also like, oh, God, why did I just eat that? Yeah. And apparently this toxin that they create, lucid befaggons, which is not a great word, but is akin to those neurotoxins that some like poisonous tree frogs produce and secrete.

So it could conceivably kill some things and I think that might be the same neurotoxin that the larvae uses venom to paralyze poor slugs and stuff like that. But some species have been like, you don't want to eat like Fireflies. Like in one study of trying to feed them to lizards mixed in with mealworms, the lizards will like, like, wipe, basically spit out and wipe away like the Firefly and then wipe it's snout with its forearm like gross. It's really funny. That was disgusting.

I think bats learned, bats are smart, you know, we have a great episode on bats and they have learned not to eat them because they did a study in Boise State where they, they coated their ab, their little lanterns with paint so the bats couldn't see them and the bats started eating them, but it didn't take very long till the bats were like literally spitting them out and saying, ah, you jerks, why you painting those lanterns? That's, I don't want to eat those things. We've learned not to eat those things. Right.

And they also found that bats that I guess hadn't been exposed to Fireflies before. If they didn't paint the Fireflies, those bats learned even faster to avoid Fireflies because of the bioluminescence. So what these Boise State researchers who conducted that study concluded was that the bioluminescence, the flashing of Fireflies and lightning bugs actually developed as a, a way to warn off predators, including bats and that it probably co-evolved with that predation and then became the, the main trait that it is now, which is a courtship ritual later on, but that it had a different purpose at first.

That's pretty interesting. Yeah. And they think this because I think in some species, the eggs and the larvae actually glow as well. And they're clearly not mating. So. No, not yet. Not for hours at a time.

I can tell you. All right. Let's take another break maybe and we'll talk about why these lightning bugs are disappearing almost at the F word and what we can do about it right after this. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb

her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay.

I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy? Bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously. I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chuck, I think it is one of the saddest things on planet earth. Yeah.

And I mean that quite actually that fireflies are vanishing very quickly because we're talking about an enormous drop and again, this is largely anecdotal from people of a certain age, like our age group that grew up like seeing tons of fireflies. Like so many fireflies, you couldn't, it never even occurred to you that they could possibly go away to where they're just gone in some places now or in my backyard in Atlanta. It's like, you know, if I see five or six, I'm like, it's a good night tonight. Yeah. And before it was like the whole yard would have been filled up with it 20 years ago and

it's really distressing to think of a world without fireflies and that seems like where we're headed and it's all our fault basically. It really is. I see them a lot more at my house than I do, I feel like elsewhere in our neighborhood because our yard is crazy and it's wild and it's, you know, we don't spray for mosquitoes or use pesticides or anything like that. So we have a pretty good, like wild habitat back there for all kinds of insects. But you know, for a long time they were harvested, I think in different parts of the world, they

were harvested commercially in Japan, the Genji Firefly. And then in the US from 60 to about 95, the Sigma Chemical Company harvested about 3 million a year to get that Luciferase and Lucifren. Yeah, apparently they sold it to the biomedical industry who would use it to like detect spoiled milk and stuff like that. Right, exactly. No, for real, that's what all those were harvested for. That's what I'm saying, all that stuff we already talked about, that's what they needed

it for. 100 million fireflies over that like 30-something year period were harvested by it for their Luciferase and then fortunately somebody, some saint, patron saint of fireflies in I think 1985. That's Nathan Fillian. Right, Nathan Fillian synthesized Luciferase and it started to become widely available and cheaper and so they let the fireflies alone after that. Why did it take 15 years to cease it, just to roll it out, I guess?

I think it was more like 10 and it was probably really expensive at first and then it took about 10 years for them to figure out how to produce it, mass produce it cheaply and then the Sigma chemical company was like, it's a penny less than the lightning bug one sold. So yeah, you are seeing fewer fireflies, it's not a figment of your imagination. They surveyed I think 350 lightning bug experts and they said, it's really three things and they're all because of us, it's habitat loss, toxic chemicals and light pollution. Habitat loss, they have, I don't think we mentioned, this is to me one of the coolest

facts of the show, is that if you see a lightning bug in your backyard then it has a very high likelihood of being born in your backyard. It's really, they're super, super localized and I just love the thought of that, that they sort of live on your property. Yeah, I mean like that's their whole world right there is your little backyard. So it kind of makes you, like when I heard that I was like, oh, I want to nurture that and take care of it. Like these are like family basically, they're like yard family, you know?

Yard family. They're not interlopers or not neighbors, they belong in your yard, that's their yard in a lot of ways. So I thought that was kind of neat to realize. One of the problems of that is though, Chuck, is that they don't migrate very well if at all, so if you disrupt their habitat and kill off the firefly population, they might be gone until unless you go find some other firefly larvae and bring them back, like a new group is not necessarily going to migrate in and repopulate the area.

Yeah, and this is like, we're looking at you individual homeowner. You can say like the contractor who comes in and bulldozes a forest to build a neighborhood and that's certainly true. But if you say, you know, I don't like, I don't have a view of blank, so I'm going to cut down these seven trees in my backyard to have a big golf course like scene. You're disrupting their habitat by doing that. Yeah, for sure. I don't want to be too judgy, but I am very much judging you.

Well, I think we should take the other tack and then promote things people can do. So get them interested on the one hand and then lay them with the haymaker of how they can, how they can help. One of the other problems is artificial light at night, Chuck. Yeah, Alan, A-L-A-N. It is, you know, light blue. We should do a whole episode on light blue. It's something that interests me.

You took the words right out of my mouth. How do they smell? Right? Gross. Oh, weird. Did you have a frittata for breakfast? Yeah. Can you smell the olives in there?

You can smell them on the words. So we're talking about everything from just street lights and business lights and any kind of light you would find in an urban or more urban or suburban area to something called sky glow, which is that just more diffuse illumination that you kind of see everywhere as well now. And that can be so bright it can exceed full moon levels. And you know, I see that stuff a little bit out at the camp even in the middle of the woods.

You can see that sky glow sort of in the lower horizon. Soft pudding. It is. But when you're a lightning bug and like you rely on light to find mates, if you're distracted by a bright light or the light that you're putting out is being drowned out by competing artificial light, like that's a real problem and that can lead to a decline in the population. So especially when you combine habitat loss with, you know, somebody keeping their back porch light on all night, every night, year round, that's, that's not good for the lightning

bugs and it's a big problem for them. So too are cars because so many fireflies and lightning bugs live in wooded areas. We've built so many roads through the woods that when people drive through there at night, those car lights can actually create a problem for their courtship and their hours long coupling as well. That's right. And then the last thing of course is, you know, if you're using pesticides and herbicides on your lawn and in your yard, you're killing all kinds of things, including lightning bugs.

If you're spraying for mosquitoes, you are, you are wrecking the pollinating system in your, in your property and killing lightning bugs. And I, I'm not going to judge because Josh told me not to, but don't spray for mosquitoes. Just don't. These are bees that's supposed to be a last resort. Like there's so many other things you can do to get rid of mosquitoes beyond just spraying for them. And then yeah, not just the mosquito spray, but any neonicotinoid pesticide is really

bad for basically every insect in the area, including bees. Remember our colony collapse episode? Yeah. So saying all the, all the pollinators are being affected. Yeah. It's just, it's devastating. But in addition to the chemicals too, you can mow your lawn too much. Our lawns actually make a pretty good habitat in the absence of other like habitats that

lightning bugs prefer. If you keep your, your grass long enough, you want to kind of provide a buffer between the mower blade and the lightning bug. So if you cut your grass a lot and keep it nice and trim, you may want to consider growing it out, you know, beyond like say the two inch length and you can mow it, but just know that when you're mowing it, you're also stepping on and crushing lightning bug larvae too. So just be thoughtful when you mow your lawn. How about that?

Yeah. Be thoughtful. Mulching is a great idea. I just, I'm actually down to kind of almost zero grass, but when I did have grass, I would just mulch mow. I'm not a big fan of raking leaves. Certainly as stuff you should know, co-host, I'm not a fan of blowing leaves because we know that you are of the devil if you're doing that.

Right? Yeah. What? You don't hate leaf blowers anymore? I hate leaf blowers, but I use one now. Oh. Oh. I know.

Things have changed. I feel like I should really, I needed to fess up about this. It's battery powered and I use it sparingly, but yes, I have a leaf blower. I do too. I never hated them like you did. I just don't think you should like blow your whole lawn like out into the street. I use it. I hate just to blow the leaf off my deck back into my yard.

You know who hates the sound of the leaf blower almost violently is David Spate. Oh, really? Yeah. If you follow him on Instagram, probably one out of every five posts is like him just like ripping into some guy who's using a leaf blower over like on the other end of his neighborhood. Oh, wow. He hates leaf blowers.

Well, I'll have to exchange brands because I don't know if yours is good, but I got a great cordless battery powered blower that's super powerful. I use the DeWalt battery power. It's pretty great. Oh, okay. What do you use? I can't remember the name of it. I have to go look.

Is it one of those like eco ones or orange is probably Husqvarna. No, it's not Husqvarna. Steel, Echo. No, no, no, no. It's not one of those big brands. I think it's like works like WORXX. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

They're good too. Boy, I was always like those battery powered and still have the juice you need, but these have the juice you need. Yeah, they have, I mean, I've got a battery powered lawnmower that I charged one time and still it just cuts like crazy like, you know, a year after the first time I charged it. They definitely work. Yeah, that's what I got too.

They last a long time. Chuck, one thing you said about blowing leaves out into the yard or out into like your curb or something like that or even raking them up and like removing them, like that is where Firefly Larva live, so you're removing the Firefly Larva from your yard to God knows where, probably not some place where they're going to be cared for and repopulate, probably going to die in the bargain. So yes, if you really care about your grass, you're not just going to leave leaves on there. But you know, if you have garden beds, you could do that.

Apparently, you don't want to clean up your garden in the fall. You want to just leave it as is over the winter because that is a habitat for all sorts of great creatures that keep your soil going, including Firefly Larva. And then you clean it up in the spring. And if you do like rake your leaves off of your lawn, don't just throw them away. Like put them in paper bags and keep them wet, like maybe under a tree for the winter and then work them into the soil in the spring. And you've got a great yard suddenly for the Firefly Larva that you just kind of help nurture

over the winter. Yeah. Plus, it's great for your garden beds. It's just really super rich. Good stuff. It really is. What else? You said basically you don't want to cut down those trees to give yourself a golf course

view. You want to kind of leave parts of your yard wild too, right? Yeah. I mean, my backyard now is a little too wild for my taste. Really? It's pretty crazy. Oh man, I got to come over and see it. Yeah.

It's, you know, yeah. I mean, Emily went nuts planning things over the past few years. And it's just, it's something else. It's like, it feels like a science experiment going on back there. That's awesome. Yeah. So yeah, we let it go wild, but you can just let parts of your, like, designate a corner of your yard and let that kind of go a little bit crazy.

Remember when we studied Darwin years ago, how he would just let everything go crazy because he could just study so much more stuff. Yeah. And like, if you have like a tree line or something on the fringes of your yard, let that go crazy, let it grow out a little bit more, like, you know, like leave some of the shrubs you think are kind of ugly that are growing in there or replace them with native shrubs even better. Or like it can be as simple as if a tree falls down in your yard and it's not like covering

the grass, just leave it where it is and let it rot. That's a great firefly habitat right there. Totally. The final thing you can do, well, just a couple of things, but turn those lights off. You got big old yard spotlights, I don't know what you're doing, but no one wants that. Your neighbors don't want that. That's true. The fireflies don't want that.

Yeah. Nobody likes that. Yeah. At least put them on like a motion sensitive thing that turns off after like a minute. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. But yeah.

Turn those lights off, try and make it dark. And then this last thing is something I'm really bummed that I missed out on this year. I did not know about it. Yeah, me too. But I'm definitely going to sign up. It's called the Vanishing Firefly Project. And what they do is offer up an app that's for free. And you, on three different days, they have a census, June 6th, July 4th, and August 1st,

where you go out and you count fireflies or lightning bugs in your yard for a certain amount of time and then enter that into the census. And they're getting a pretty robust like body of data from this. Yeah. This is a group called Firefly Watch from the Museum of Science in Boston. And they have an even more extensive census. But it's basically like citizen scientists contributing to much needed data. Because like we were saying, all the stuff about the fireflies vanishing is anecdotal.

And only now are researchers really starting to turn to studying the issue so we can figure out what the biggest problems are and how to alleviate them so we don't lose fireflies. Because nobody wants that. I don't care how nihilistic you are. I don't care how little you care about anything. If you stopped and really searched your feelings, you would find that you don't want a world without fireflies. Agreed.

Or lightning bugs. Agreed, even more. And I have to say, Chuck, I really feel like we brought the country together much needed by using both fireflies and lightning bugs in this episode. Agreed. Okay. Well, since Chuck said agreed at least three times, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this hot off the presses.

Hey, guys, this is Kelsey from Chico, California. I'm a counselor and professor at a local community college and I've never gotten sarcasm. My family is very blunt. And if anyone is sarcastic, well, I wouldn't know it. I start all my classes explaining that I'm being... Wait a minute. That was sarcasm, right? So I start all my classes explaining that I'm being genuine and if you think I said something

sarcastic, I didn't. But in the podcast, you mentioned that individuals that are neuro atypical might not get sarcasm. My friends who work in special education have totally used hand signs with me when they are being sarcastic. In your podcast, which I've listened to from the beginning, I only know Josh is being sarcastic when I think, hmm, that was kind of mean and then Chuck giggles a little bit. That's the tell, I guess. When my husband is sarcastic and he gets a double laugh, meaning he laughs at himself

for the joke, I do that a lot, and then giggles a little when he has to explain it to me, that's when I know he's being sarcastic. Anyway, you two are great and I often use your podcast as another form of learning in my courses and that is from Kelsey. Thanks a lot, Kelsey. Thanks for pointing all that out because I hadn't really realized how that could be interpreted. But Chuck is my sarcasm beard, everybody. Thank you for that, Chuck.

I appreciate it. Well, we appreciate Kelsey, too, for writing in and if you want to be like Kelsey, you can send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts on I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

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