fireflies
gregladen | April 26, 2016Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies is about fireflies.
How do they light up? Why do they light up?
It is axiomatic in nature that flashy displays are related to mating. Among the flashy displays various animals have come up with, a few actually flash, and among those, the flashing of the firefly is probably the most well known. And, yes, it is a mating strategy.
There are almost 2,000 species of fireflies and they live around the world. Not all flash, but they are phylogenetically related to those that do so we use the vernacular term "firefly" to refer to all of them. (The…
ddobbs | July 1, 2009
Among the many treats in Carl Zimmer's new Times piece on fireflies and sex -- go, and be enchanted -- I particularly liked this quick peek at how a life and a career can take a sharp turn for the most unplanned of reasons:
It was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
"Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies…
awild | March 13, 2009
Lucidota atra, the black firefly. New York.
Not all fireflies luminesce. Lucidota atra is a day-flying species, common in eastern North America, with vestigial light-producing organs.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f/13, flash diffused through tracing paper