By T. Edward Nickens | Aug/Sept 09 | 

Who Turned Out the Lights

Firefly populations appear to be dwindling. The question is why 

When I was a kid, a biochemical company in St. Louis, Missouri, paid a penny apiece for live lightning bugs and even provided mailing cartons. At the time, it didn’t take long to collect enough of the insects to bankroll a pack of Green Apple Now and Laters. Four decades later, luciferase—the enzyme that sparks the firefly’s fire—can now be made in a laboratory, and the open market for live lightning bugs has dried up. But I still associate the season’s first firefly with the jingle of pennies in my pocket, and the tart smell of Granny Smiths.

It’s a good thing I’m not counting on lightning bugs to bolster my allowance these days, though. From the Tennessee foothills to Thailand, researchers are pondering an apparent worldwide decline in firefly numbers. Unfortunately, few studies exist to help nail down the declines, and there’s no baseline of information. “No one was censusing fireflies fifty years ago,” explains Jonathan Copeland, a biology professor at Georgia Southern University who has studied fireflies in Southeast Asia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Instead, anecdotal evidence from both researchers and casual observers suggests an overall diminution of numbers, a realization that our summer evenings just aren’t lit like they used to be.