It’s firefly season again! 🔥🪰 / ⚡️🐞
Spring Tree-Top Flasher
“Consider the charisma of a firefly: a beetle that makes no one cringe, that we chase after with jars, a thing that glows. Consider that a firefly is a firefly for only two weeks. That before it is a firefly, it crawls through the dark for a year, wingless. It eats and eats. It tunnels through leaf litter, lethal and glowing. With its mandible it pierces slugs, earthworms, and snails, paralyzing them with venom. It glows so as not to be eaten. It molts out of its exoskeleton and grows bigger.
We assume fireflies will always be here for us, a ritual that carries children through summer dusks. But are our lawns too short, our nights too bright with artificial light? By the time we see them, fireflies have spent a winter underground and have emerged, frenzied to mate, into a confusing world that is not dark enough. They do not eat. Singleminded, they lack even mouthparts. They try to make the brightest flash.” - Kateri Kosek