Bioluminescence is actual magic. I will take no calls on this matter.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Eh, what fireflies can do is kinda the base level of the bioluminescence 'skill' of the evolutionary tech tree.
https://gizmodo.com/glowing-deep-sea-squid-have-a-complex-form-of-communica-1842472534
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DE89YY7zCio
Humboldt squid skin is bioluminiscent, but roughly akin to a flexible lcd or oled screen, with many different 'pixels' capable of being set specifically.
They likely have the ability to communicate by basically displaying different patterns of different colors and brightnesses and translucency, sorta like a human walking around with a sandwich board made of lcd screens, which they can control with a phone app.
They may very well have an entire language they can convey via sequenced or at least specific patterns.
Note: No clue if you can actually trace bioluminescence in fireflies and certain cephalopods to the same common ancestor or if its completely different, independent evolutionary occurances, but my point is there are certainly more and less complex and utility granting forms of bioluminescence.
"I cast 200 μg Luciferin."
[Dice noises]
"Nat 15. Your abdomen glows and dims slowly and rhythmically."
Pathfinder 2e literally has bioluminescence bombs that's just jarred firefly juice that's secreted by humanoid fey that resemble the bugs
Nah, it legit is, though. Just because someone or most someones understand how something happens doesn't mean it isn't magic anymore. It just means that we have a hard magic system. We understand our magic so well that we've stopped seeing it as magical, but if you take a step back and take a look at the big picture it becomes clear that the world is magical, and everything around us is this amazing, often confusing, incredible tapestry of Wonder and awe. The world has just ground us down so much that we feel like wonder is strictly for children, that we're not allowed to feel wonder anymore. Embrace the magic. Even if you know how it works.
Sometimes I stop to think about the fact that a tiny electrical impulse in my brain can cause my fingers to move and press buttons on my keyboard, which in turn causes larger, but still small electrical impulses to trigger a shiny rock we trapped lightning in to do an immense number of calculations, to send a stream of further impulses to my network router, which sends them on to another router, and another, and on and on, each step might go via a wire, or radio, or the flashing of a tiny light, or even bounce off of a satellite in space and back to another router, until it eventually finds it's way to a server, which does huge numbers of further calculations, then sends impulses back to me, and also to other servers, via just as remarkable a route, which in turn send impulses down wires and optical fibres and bouncing off of satellites until one of those streams of impulses gets to your router, where it gets sent on to your shiny lightning rock, which performs many calculations and causes a pattern of light and dark dots to appear in front of you, which cause a series of tiny electrical impulses in your brain, that you perceive have meaning.
The natural world is filled with magic and wonder, but this is a magic we designed and built ourselves.
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Spelling it without help is also magic, so I hear ya.
Magic exists but we call it science
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We used to have so many of them when I was a kid. Their numbers are dwindling. 😭
Saw this just the other day here...
I saw that the other day too. It's just that 35 years ago, everyone still raked their lawns. Same as 35 years before that.
We are in the middle of an insect apocalypse.
Remember when you were little how many fucking moths there were? Couldn't keep the porch light on at night or they'd get in the house and you'd be finding moth carcasses all summer.
Now there's just a few. Hardly see any anymore.
Same for house flies, and bees. I used to have to go and spray for wasps every spring, I don't remember the last one I saw.
Remember when you needed a bug shield to drive on the highway?
Yes and yes (to the person you replied to). All I'm saying is that that narrative seems to be coalescing around "it's because people raked leaves." Does that play a part? Probably. But there's no way it's just that. It's far too pervasive to be "personal actions." The root cause has to be systemic.
It's not just the leaves, it's humans fucking with the environment, on a macro and micro scale. But that's harder to convey in a single panel
Agreed. But as someone who grew up with the Crying Indian, I am very wary of this kind of oversimplification. It was always, "make sure to cut the rings from the six pack of cans so the turtles don't get stuck," and not, "stop manufacturing death traps," or, Primus forbid, "stop treating the ocean and waterways in general like free waste disposal." It's still being actively astroturfed to this day (see also plastic straws). Case in point: a few years ago there was an "accidental chemical waste discharge" into a tributary of a major regional river that is used as a water source for much of the area. This was posted about in a lightly trafficked regional subreddit where a "hot" post might accumulate a few dozen upvotes over the course of a day and a handful of comments. This one reached over a hundred comments within hours.
It's only x gallons, the river moves y gallons every minute. Nobody would have noticed until the media made a big deal."
The same stuff is used in cosmetics and people put it on their face every day. It's harmless.
And so on.
Messaging is important. The corporate class understands this. Hence trying to shift blame for every single systemic issue onto individuals. Plastic straws. You don't have the right to swim in clean water. Plastic bags. Fuel efficiency. Overnight delivery. Vote with your wallet. Overproduction. Recycling. And now raking leaves.
Want all that in a single panel? Zoom out from the raked lawn and show the silhouette of a factory belching smoke into the air and vomiting waste into a river in the background.
It's also humans continually expanding and building in previously undeveloped areas. It crowds out other species.
30 years ago it didnt matter if you raked your leaves because there were still plenty of areas for lightning bugs to migrate in from. But when everyone's surrounded by miles of suburbs the lightning bugs have further to go for you to see them
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i tell this to people all the time and they do not believe me
Grasshoppers too. I used to fill buckets with them as a kid. I haven't seen more than a few in the last decade.
The less I maintain my yard the more lightning bugs we get.
We do not maintain our back yard very well. I refuse to let these amazing insects disappear. We also seed for pollinators as well.
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The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor's yards. I'm the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.
A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.
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It brings me unimaginable sadness to know that my recently born nephew will grow up in such a region, when just a few years ago you could see hundreds of these guys in any given back yard
We've been living at the same house for about a decade. We have a tiny tiny creek in our back yard with some unmowed area around it. Our yard is chemical free and we have tons of pollinators. We saw single digit numbers of lightning bugs for nearly the time we lived here. Never more than two a night and most nights none showed up.
The past few years we've seen an uptick. Not loads, but they seem to be making a small comeback. At least in our yard.
I lived most of my life in areas where fireflies were around, but they weren't the bioluminescent type,
The house I moved to about 5 years ago is in the woods and 3 months out of the year these guys buzz around my front yard and I've even helped a few out of the house.
They never fail to bring a smile to my face.
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Also, people are born every day, and some just go on with their lives never learning about random facts like these. Every day, someone is one of the lucky 10k.
Man, imagine seeing a field of fireflies IRL for the first time, if you had never heard of them before! That would be pretty mindblowing.
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I grew up calling them lightning bugs, and I'm so excited to see a thread full of people calling them the same!
In German, they're Glühwürmchen ("glow worms").
Wait hold up, in Dutch we have glimwormen ("shimmer worms" ) but those don't fly! They're actual bioluminecent worms.
Aren't German Glühwürmchen the same thing?
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coming from australia, this is super real… we have such a unique set of animals and plants that it’s all just so normal to us, but then you travel overseas and everything is like what you see on tv and in movies
i’m mid 30s, and last year i saw snow falling for the first time in chicago… snow falling is beautiful, and to most of the world it’s just normal - to australians, it just never happens
Seeing how Australians react to kangaroos like they're just slightly more dangerous deer is so jarring
To be fair, they mostly are just slightly more dangerous deer
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I hope you get many beautiful snowfalls in your life yet
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I know a girl in south carolina who wasn't from there; she saw lightning bugs for the first time there one summer and she started crying. I find that story very touching- its a reminder not to be blind to the beauty of the world, even if that beauty is so common that it's unremarkable.
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My mom grew up in an area of California with no fireflies. When she was a teenager, she went on a cross-country trip with a friend. In the mountains of North Carolina, they were driving along at night when some bugs hit the windshield of their car. They didn't think much of it... until the bug guts started glowing. Then they screamed.
No fireflies where I live, but that doesn't mean my childhood was free of a beautiful insect swarm.
My area had a bad outbreak of cockchafers I got to enjoy.
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I grew up in the American southwest and I saw them for the first time last summer. I probably looked crazy to people, a guy in his late 20s taking pictures and videos of bugs along the road to send to my family, but I was genuinely mystified
I thought I was seeing spots on the edge of my vision or something before I realized what they were. I always thought they were constantly emitting light, not twinkling
Different areas have different lightning bugs too. The ones in southern ontario are not the same as the ones in the midwest US.
They have distinct blinking patterns as well. IIRC observing the pattern is one of the ways used to classify them.
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these guys are great!
I was also blown away the first time I've seen bioluminescent bacteria on some strip algae...you would pass your finger by them and see the hidden binary encoded alien messages
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