Sitting outside tonight watching the lightning bugs dance through the air takes me back to the long summer nights of my childhood....
Starting in late June they'd come -- as much a sign that summer had arrived as the warm weather, cold watermelon, and good humor man's jingle as he drove his truck through the neighborhood....
Lightning Bugs are the same as Fireflies. They are members of a particular family of the Beetle. There are more than 2000 species of fireflies and there are even some that don't light up!
My brother and sisters and I would go outside after supper to play, and wait for dark.....I remember just being up and outside after 9pm was a big treat for us in those days-
We each had our own mason jar- and we'd have contests to see who could catch the most bugs.
Sometimes we'd collect them, and then add them all together into one jar in an attempt to make a lantern. We figured that if we caught enough of them, surely we'd be able to use the jar like a flashlight! If only we could figure out how to make them all flash at the same time!
Flashing Lightning Bugs are trying to attract mates. Among most but not all species of North American Lightning Bugs, males fly about flashing while females perch on vegetation, usually near the ground. If the female sees a flasher and she's ready to mate she responds by flashing right after the male's last flash. A short flash dialogue takes place as the male flies closer and closer, and then, if all goes well, they mate.
Sometimes we'd take the "light" off of the bug and string it onto a wire and try to make a ring or a necklace. Other times we'd let a bunch of them loose onto the driveway and take a big rock to the group, pulverizing them and watching the display of light left behind.
Good thing there were Bug Rights people around or we'd have been in big big trouble! We weren't always nice to those lighning bugs!
Light production in fireflies is due to a chemical reaction that occurs in specialized light-emitting organs usually on the lower abdomen. The enzyme luciferase acts on luciferin in this organ to stimulate light emission. Genes coding for these substances have been inserted into many different organisms. Luciferase is also used in forensics and the enzyme has medical uses.
Bioluminescence is a very efficient process. Some 90% of the energy a firefly uses to create light is actually converted into visible light. By comparison an incandescent electric bulb can only convert 10% of total energy used into visible light, and the remainder is emitted as heat.
There were a few nights where we left those fireflies in the mason jars only to wake up the next morning and find they'd all died. So then we figured out to make holes in the lids so that we could wake up to live bugs to play with during the day....
But they weren't as "magical" in daylight.
And as we got older, we would release the bugs we caught before we went inside for the night.
By then we realized that their magic was somehow related to those long dark summer nights....
