All About Firerflies

For today's blog posting I decided to include information about fireflies.  I have always been fascinated with them.  Once when I was a teenager a friend brought me up to a field that had tens of thousands of fireflies.  I will never forget that.  The whole field was glowing and blinking.

Lampyridae is a family of insects in the beetle order Coleoptera. They are winged beetles, and commonly called fireflies or lightning bugs for their conspicuous use of bioluminescence to attract mates or prey. Fireflies produce a "cold light", with no infrared or ultraviolet frequencies. This chemically produced light from the lower abdomen may be yellow, green, or pale red, with wavelengths from 510 to 670 nanometers.

There are around 2,000 species of firefly found in temperate and tropical environments. Many can be found in marshes or in wet, wooded areas where their larvae have abundant sources of food. These larvae emit light and often are called "glowworms." In Grand Marais I have seen the larvae glowing along side creeks and lakes.  In many species, both male and female fireflies have the ability to fly, but in some species, females are flightless.

Fireflies tend to be brown and soft-bodied, often with the front wings more leathery than in other beetles. Although the females of some species are similar in appearance to males, larviform females are found in many other firefly species. These females can often be distinguished from the larvae only because they have compound eyes. The most commonly known fireflies are nocturnal,

A few days after mating, a female lays her fertilized eggs on or just below the surface of the ground. The eggs hatch three to four weeks later, and the larvae feed until the end of the summer.  Fireflies hibernate over winter during the larval stage, some species for several years. Some do this by burrowing underground, while others find places on or under the bark of trees. They emerge in the spring. After several weeks of feeding, they pupate for 1.0 to 2.5 weeks and emerge as adults.

The larvae of most species are specialized predators and feed on other larvae, terrestrial snails, and slugs. Some are so specialized that they have grooved mandibles that deliver digestive fluids directly to their prey. Adult diet varies: some are predatory, while others feed on plant pollen or nectar. Some, like the European Glow-worm beetle, Lampyris noctiluca, have no mouth.

Most fireflies are quite distasteful to eat and sometimes poisonous to vertebrate predators. This is due at least in part to a group of steroid pyrones known as lucibufagins (LBGs), which are similar to the chemical  found in some poisonous toads

Light production in fireflies is due to a type of chemical reaction called bioluminescence. This process occurs in specialized light-emitting organs, usually on a firefly's lower abdomen. The enzyme luciferase acts on the luciferin, in the presence of magnesium ions, ATP, and oxygen to produce light. 

All fireflies glow as larvae. Bioluminescence serves a different function in larvae than it does in adults. It appears to be a warning signal to predators, since many firefly larvae contain chemicals that are distasteful or toxic.  Light in adult beetles was originally thought to be used for similar warning purposes, but now its primary purpose is thought to be used in mate selection. Fireflies are a classic example of an organism that uses bioluminescence for sexual selection. They have a variety of ways to communicate with mates in courtships: steady glows, flashing, and the use of chemical signals unrelated to photic systems.  Some species in Southeast Asia cooperate and all flash at the same time.

CITES: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly
http://www.ForestWander.com