Field guide: Lightning bugs

A dazzling sign of springtime

A disply of Photinus carolinus in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2017 (Credit: Niemand für Polyphemus, Creative Commons)

A reminder: the soft launch for the print version of Southlands is on—pre-sales are now live and merch is coming soon!

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Fireflies—or lightning bugs, as they’re more typically called here in the South—are, as writer Georgann Eubanks puts it, “shooting stars within reach, fireworks at eye level, sudden birthday candles coming out of pitch dark.” Most of all, she notes, they signal the changing seasons. To chase these sparks of light is a summertime ritual for many kids lucky enough to live in a place where they thrive.

But a very special form of bug lightning marks the peak of Southern springtime: a synchronous flashing, whole fields of fireflies blinking their lights in concert.

This insectile talent is, at least for scientists, a relatively new discovery: First noted in Thailand in 1968, the behavior was not confirmed in the Western Hemisphere until the 1990s. Notably, that confirmation occurred in the backyard of a Tennessee mountain cabin. Today, of the three species known to engage in synchronous flashing, two are found here in the South: Photinus carolinus, whose name itself indicates their association with the Smoky Mountains (though they can be found in pockets throughout Appalachia, as far south as Georgia and as far north as New York); and Photuris frontalis, commonly known as Snappy Syncs, found in small populations across the Southeast, often in lower-lying land. Their presence here is a reminder of a fact familiar to most of us Southlanders, if overlooked by the rest of the world—that we remain a hotspot for biodiversity.

The synchronized flashing remains ”one of the most tantalising mysteries in complex systems science,” as one scientist recently put it. Mathematics, it turns out, is key to understanding this behaviour—not just because we need math to calculate the precise frequency of the flashing, but because of something called the “signal-to-noise ratio.” Fireflies flash to signal their presence to potential mates, but to a female observer, there can be a whole lot of flashing from many different species. Thus the working theory: Flash together, however briefly, and the males of one species stand out.

Phontinus carolinus is one of two Southern synchronous fireflies (Credit: cotinus, Creative Commons)

Our difficulty understanding the flashing is due to the rarity: The fireflies only synchronize for a few hours each night on perhaps 10 days each year. And those days are approaching—they’ve arrived already, for example, in South Carolina. (Indeed, they’ve passed in the places; the further south you go, the earlier spring passes, and in Florida the days of synced-up flashing are over.)

In North Carolina, the hub of a burgeoning firefly tourism industry, the flashing will come in late May and early June. This, I should note, is a hot ticket: Tens of thousands of people enter a lottery each year for around a thousand tickets to see the fireflies in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. If you’re interested, start checking this page daily. The lottery should open any day now, and won’t last long. I’d guess that Tennessee State Parks will announce their lottery for Rocky Ford State Park soon.¹ And if you fail to win a lottery, you can head on your own to Joyce Kilmer National Forest and hope to get lucky; or you can join private expeditions, like Snakeroots Ecotours, based in Celo, North Carolina. Grandfather Mountain’s nature park hosts viewings, too.

I’m all for nature tourism, though I should note that I know people who have, by paying attention, repeated that 1990s Tennessee cabin miracle: they’ve found the magic of fireflies in their own backyards. It was only after Georgann Eubanks took a tour to see blue ghost lightning bugs—not a synchronous species, but still wondrous in their long illumination and slow, swooping flights—that she realized they lived on her own property. These turn out to be a not-particularly-rare creature; it’s just that it’s not so often that we sit still in the darkness long enough to find them. I have friends in Mississippi who found synchronous fireflies in their backyard. Let that be a suggestion: Walk out into the wild darkness. Perhaps you’ll find fireflies. At worst, you’ll be sitting within a universe of stars.

—Boyce

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Bad news first

I’d usually put an article like this in the Lowdown, below, but I think it’s worth keeping our eye on the ball: DOGE has essentially taken over the Department of the Interior, which oversees federal public lands. This is, in my opinion, very bad news. As usual, Wes Siler has the details on his Substack; helpfully, he also has some thoughts on how to fight back.

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Going deep

Spotted salamander / Brian Gratwicke

Shot in the dark: After receiving a permit for an unusually permissive deer hunt, a Virginia hunter considers the ethics of fair chase.

Death in the woods: Sure, nature is good for mental health. But, as one example in North Carolina proves, “wilderness therapy camps” can be deadly. (The Assembly)

Saving the spotted salamander: Homewood, Alabama—the site of the annual Salamander Festival—fights for the future of its endangered emblem.

+ Hurricane Helene was apocalyptic for America’s largest salamander. But restoring its habitat may be restoring our own, too.

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Louisiana lowdown, cont’d

Over the past few newsletters, I’ve been tracking mounting obstacles to the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, the most ambitious project yet conceived to restore Louisiana’s fading marshland. The state’s new governor has signaled opposition to the project, and last week came what feels like a fatal blow: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is signaling that it plans to withdraw the required permits.

In a tweet (grok?), Gov. Jeff Landry described the project as “a real life” “John Grisham novel” and accused former Gov. John Bel Edwards of keeping essential information from the federal government. The Corps’ letter (attached to Landry’s tweet) also alleges that the state “deliberately withheld” information, though it does not indicate that the missing information would have altered any decisions. Instead, the letter notes that the state’s newly expressed reservations about maintenance costs and desire to build a smaller diversion have altered the cost-benefit analysis.

The Corps gave the state ten days to respond—but with Landry in charge, Louisiana seems unlikely to defend this project. Indeed, the Corps’ letter refers to several communications from the chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, a Landry ally; those letters have not been made public, but I’m guessing those letters themselves prompted this revocation. So, with that, thirty years of work by many coastal advocates and millions of dollars in planning and construction costs are gone with the wind…

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The (rest of the) lowdown

Fewer ducks in America’s duck-hunting capital means less money for conservation, too. // A judge orders water clean-ups in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon, for the sake of its manatees. // A Florida nonprofit has raised the money to save a sliver of wild. // The Florida senate has approved a ban on oil drilling along the Apalachicola River. // New legal opposition to the longstanding policy that has protected American wetlands.

1. Congaree National Park, in South Carolina, holds a firefly lottery, too, though, alas, it’s already over.