An examination of lost firefly species of the US and Canada | Hacker News Reader

An examination of lost firefly species of the US and Canada

journaloflostspecies.org

151 pointsbryanrasmussen68 comments

DO NOT RAKE YOUR LAWNS.

This is why we don't have fireflys anymore. They were everywhere growing up. They lay eggs on the bottoms of fallen leaves. HOA's demand you rake your leaves. This kills the firefly.

That's easy to say but anyone with a lawn is typically bound by local ordinances. I don't even live in a particularly nice area and I got a warning citation for some cool looking thistle I decided to let grow this year.

> I got a warning citation for some cool looking thistle

What the hell is this dystopia really.. oh American suburbs

Could be lots of places.

Could it? Where else in the world has this sort of control? Most countries have more lawn freedom I think, you might get people disapprove but there are no controls.

Certainly in the UK and Ireland there are controls. Same here in NL too.

Lawn Controls...

..just the fact that anyone can say that phrase with a straight face...

Where in the UK? I am in the UK and I grow wildflowers all over my front lawn and no one stops me, and there are no powers to stop me.

I can imagine the USA declaring war on a country over unmowed lawns

I apologise, I was thinking of laws about long grass being a nuisance but having looked in to it more it’s better than I thought, wildflower meadow seems ok.

As a neighboring country inhabitant, now I'm curious: where in NL?

(And like the sibling comment, also: where in UK? IIRC there's a whole 'no lawns' scene in the UK)

Noxious weed probably? They can be harmful to local ecology.

More likely a native plant.

It's native. Just considered "icky".

Hint: you can get around most issues just by making it looking intentional. Grow a prairie in your front yard, but carefully keep a well mowed path down the middle and around the edges. This makes the whole look like a well maintained garden and will stop a lot of complaints. It won't stop everything, but it goes a long way.

Of course check what is native. Where I live prairie is native. However if you live in woods you shouldn't be planting tall grass.

Also undisturbed grass is great for ground nesting birds! We saw them return when we left a field fallow in Ireland. Less helpful in suburbia admittedly

>> DO NOT RAKE YOUR LAWNS. This is why we don't have fireflys anymore

Or, don't have lawns. Suburban grass lawns are a very unnatural structure and I find it odd that any insect would be so dependent on them. Raking leaves immediately around houses is an important fire safety measure. Perhaps the better option is to minimize lawns in favor of natural forest/tree cover where leaves are more likely to rot before they dry out enough to become a fire hazard.

Where I live tall grass is the natural structure. We have a lot of trees in our suburbs - but they don't belong at all (except on river bottoms), grass is correct (not mowed grass, but grass)

Everyone else: figure out what is correct for where you live. There is no one correct answer for everybody.

I wish it was just raking at this point. The only person I've seen raking in many years is my 90+ year-old neighbor. Everyone else has the backpack leafblower SWAT teams.

It’s the same where I live and it’s insane. Nearly every day there’s a leaf blower going for seemingly hours and it’s so loud.

We always raked our lawn when I was a child (and I did a lot of the raking), as did my grandparents who lived in their house for 40 years before I was born, yet there were always plenty of fireflies. I don't think you can blame raking for killing them off.

As kid in Virginia in the 60s Summer evenings were magical - Lightening Bug galore. Then mosquito spraying began. The mosquitos remained - Lightening Bugs not so much:(

Or even a kid in the 90s and 2000s. The lightning bugs are mostly gone.

My kids think it's a big deal when they see one, and we live in a rural area with very little spraying happening.

Still have them galore up north where I am. Had at least a couple thousand last summer one night -- it was very cool.

Whereabouts?

Nice to see that "swatting with badminton rackets" isn't endangering them enough to make the article. As someone who was raised in a firefly-dense rural area, let me tell you, the thrill of the bioluminescent sparks is the closest I got to cocaine as a kid.

I was born in and spent most of my life in the bay area before moving to Kansas City over 10 years ago (long story).

Seeing fireflies for the first time, in my 30s, was (and still is) magical.

They have blue ones in North Carolina! Fascinating.

Here in SE Tennessee, we have a few areas with the "congregating pulses" type (i.e. they all blink [mostly] together). But they're all green, here =D

You sound remorseful (from your youthful indiscretions); but out of curiosity... does the "glow" splat when thwacked (with a tennis racket)? or does it immediately extinguish?

It was the hellish sort of destructive behavior unique to teenage boys. Very, very fun in its own way. But, alas, perhaps I’m still paying back the universe in some way.

The bioluminescence stays lit for some time. For example, you can paint your face with it. With the rackets, they splatter like fireworks.

>With the rackets, they splatter like fireworks.

[looks at tennis racket nervously]

"I'm an adult. I will not record this incredibly-sounding phenomenon for the YouTuby viewies..."

I'll just take your word for it.

----

I am forty-something, but I still always cringe when I think about that sappling I destroyed (recklessly, with my teenage-swung crowbar), just to show off to some girl...

I thought I saw red one in the deep Pennsylvania Woods and I would definitely see blue ones occasionally.

I live in the suburbs of Austin and we get them around our backyard. On nights when they were most active I would go wake up my kids and we would watch them for a while.

In this rural area the closest kids get to cocaine is methamphetamine.

This comment rings in my ears like a gunshot. I wish reality didn’t make it so poetic.

30 years ago we caught them in glass jars. They were so dense in rural Missouri that you could catch several at a time by swinging an open container through the air.

First we lost the stars in the sky now we lost the stars on Earth

We’re always losing things, eg carrier pigeons.

It's depressing to imagine people a couple decades from now spending their entire lives inside concrete jungles (as some already do now)

seeing only manufactured wonders, with no longing for what's beyond

The problem is, humans operate as if such forces only happen to lower species.

Is that really a problem? And if it is, it will resolve itself soon enough.

Problematic in that it de-emphasizes anthropocene mitigations

Where I live the stars are still there but the fireflies are gone. Such a shame.

A city or town with no haze or light pollution? Where is that magical place?

While traveling even in rural parts of less-developed countries, there was a glow in the sky from nearby cities. When opening the curtains the sky was brighter than my room in the middle of the night!

But wet have lots of cool up lighting to highlight your McMansion at 3AM!

Seasonal reminder: many insect species need the shelter of fallen leaves now and until springtime.

Modern lawn-care practices amount to devastating habitat loss. You can learn more about good choices for your area from your local county extension office.

If your office has been defunded, you can also try your friendly neighborhood public librarian.

But if you let the fallen leaves sit on your lawn all winter they are a matted wet mess in the spring and they kill your lawn. I blow mine to wooded areas at the edges of my property

And mosquito city during the fall here in Texas

That’s just revealing how strange and unnatural lawns are. I switched to low-growing native plants and have been very happy with almost zero maintenance.

Well, what is natural and where is the line?

We domisticated grazing animals since a while in large numbers, the smaller ones do produce something like a lawn. And soft grass is just really nice to play around with the kids. So I also simply keep bushes and tree spots for the leaves and insects.

It’s not really a complicated philosophical question.

Lawns aren’t native to your area. That type of grass didn’t evolve there, and it didn’t evolve to being trimmed short. That’s why it doesn’t produce seeds and why it’s killed by leaves.

But where I live there are larges areas of native grass that evolved to being trimmed short by grazers, spreading eagerly through rhizomes as a survival trait because of frequent brush fires. It gets killed by leaves every spring and spreads back by the fall but after a burn the trees are gone and its one of the early succession pioneers. A maintained lawn is just holding a post-burn condition in stasis.

Simplistic answers really work best when things are complicated philosophical questions.

Yeah and most lawns aren’t composed of native species :/

Typical lawns are not native grass and don’t spread by rhizome. You’re making my point, and I can’t tell if that’s your intention or not.

My lawn, like what I consider a 'typical' lawn, is grass. Grasses spread through rhizomes. Rhizomes are one of the things that define grasses. The rhizomes are what let the grass survive going dormant in the hot and dry summer, the frozen ground and deep snow cover in the winter, and the frequent fires every few decades for which the entire local ecosystem is heavily adapted. And yes, grasses will reproduce sexually as well if left uncut/ungrazed/unburnt.

You point was that lawns are not normal. My point is that lawns are completely normal, at least where I live.

"Lawns aren’t native to your area."

Aside to what the other commentor has said, nature doea not mean static preservation, but it always changed all the time (and we are part of it).

Native and natural in the sense of 'adapted to its environment', not 'static'

Transplanting 'English Manor' grass and lawn practices to a desert creates an unbridgeable adaptation gap. This kind of lawn cannot survive without draining every aquifer in a 300 mile radius. Texas lawns, in particular, yearn for death, you can watch them die in real time.

Lawns that require almost no maintenance using native plants have always been possible, but they don't reflect the class and status dynamics that neighborhoods want to show off.

They'd rather have dying sickly grass most of the year, and pay yearly to to replace, than allow a single 'weed' to be a part of their landscaping.

"Lawns that require almost no maintenance using native plants have always been possible, but they don't reflect the class and status dynamics that neighborhoods want to show off."

In wild nature, there tend to be spikey things. I still run barefoot there. I don't care about status dynamics, but I do also like a soft grassy ground to jump and run around with my kids,

But I do let patches on the side grow complete, only mowing once a year - and especially before the fireflies come - I let the whole lawn grow extra high (with only some ways cut low) for the fireflies and insects. In spring the flowers are also nice. Still, some patches of nice lawn I always have and use with joy. It all is a compromise (still it greatly triggers me, if family members mow too early and too much).

You’re just inventing your own definitions of “native” and “natural” that are different from how scientists and other people use those words. It’s a pointless semantic argument.

But grass is annoying and killing it is good

I saw some fireflies a couple of years ago. I hadn't seen any in years and haven't seen any since. They've basically disappeared. Hardly any bugs on the windshield, either. We're losing all kinds of insects.

I live semi rural and have an oak, maple, hickory and birch on the property. Half an acre is being restored to native prairie. But I do have to “rake” some, and mulch some or the grass will die and the hill I live on will erode.

I do leave as much as I can, and I leave them on the ground as long as I can for insects to hatch. In 3.5 years I think I’ve seen an impact with more fireflies, plus more wildlife activity in general.

I have too many hobbies and not nearly enough time or space, but I’ve always been interested in raising glowworms at some point.

This channel has some fairly unique practical information on raising them (and some other things as well) for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/@PeppersnGlowworms/playlists

When first married and bringing my new wife home to Iowa, there were billions of fireflies over a hayfield. She said What is that? Fireflies! No, she said, that's a fairy tale.

She was astounded to find out they were real.

That was also the last time I ever saw fireflies in those numbers. Maybe 30 years ago.

My knee-jerk reaction to this was, "sigh, more extinct species" - however, "lost species" in this context, as I learned from this paper, means:

> Herein, we define ‘lost species’ as those with no confirmed observation record within the past decade.

Confirmed from another source [0], which attempts to formalize the language (not that long ago!).

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/oryx/article/lost-bu...

Raise your hand if you always assumed there was only one species of firefly.

we should teach our children to live as friends with insects and other living creatures. When we were kids,we weren't this aware of it. but now I hope its time to act consciously and take action.

Don't forget about the arachnids.

Spiders are like senior members of nature's janitorial staff. I've seen them convert a periodic trail of ants into a mass grave within a few days.

Everyone I know who hires an exterminator has significantly worse issues than the occasional spider sighting. I don't actively encourage them but I also don't try to clean their homes out aggressively. I'll do yard work around them (they get until next time to move). Arachnids are unusually intelligent given their size and often seem to get the hint.

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