Lightning bug or firefly, this beetle lights up the sky on summer nights. (C) iStockphoto
West Lafayette, Ind. — Some people call these insects lightning bugs. Other folks refer to them as fireflies. These common names are misleading, because the insects are neither bugs nor flies. They are beetles.
Scientists classify these beetles under the taxonomic family name of Lampyridae. The name, like the common names lightningbug and firefly, reflects the ability of the beetles to produce light.
Light production by living organisms is known as bioluminescence. Humans have always been fascinated by this miracle of nature. Spectacular nighttime displays of flashing lights by flying beetles are one of the true awe-inspiring sights of nature. Such displays are common from June through September in the croplands, roadsides, grasslands and forests of the eastern part of the United States from the Missouri River to the Atlantic Ocean.
Almost any person who was a child in these regions has, at one time or another, tried to capture the insects and put them in a jar. Likewise, many are the poets who have tried to capture the magic and beauty of the light-producing insects in poetry.
One such poetic rendering, according to entomologist F. E. Lutz, “places the anatomical location of the Lampyrids’ luminous organs” correctly. The ditty that some ascribe to the Kansas newspaperman E. F. Ware goes:
“The lightning-bug is brilliant
But he hasn’t any mind.
He blunders through existence
With his headlight on behind.”
Those lines might have been the inspiration for Ogden Nash, who, in making light of that fact that scientists of the time really didn’t really understand how firefly bioluminescence works, wrote:
“I can think of nothing eerier
than flying around
with an unidentified glow
on a person’s posteerier.”
Poets have not ignored the fascination of children with the light-producing insects over the years. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow chronicles in Hiawatha’s Childhood children watching “Little flitting, white-fire insects …. ere in sleep I close my eyelids.”
Harriet Prescott, in Poets of Maine, recounts watching fireflies in the company of a young love in the first stanza of her poem, The Fire-flies in the Wheat:
“Ah, never of a summer night
Will life again be half as sweet
As in that country of delight
Where straying, staying, with happy feet
We watched the fire-flies in the wheat.”
Some poets, such as Jones Very addressed the reason that fireflies produce light. In Very’s The Fireflies, we read:
“Each with a lamp, like human kind:
They seek perchance their food;
Or, by its light, each other find,
As suits their varying mood.”
The Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley, in one of his most famous poems, Little Orphant Annie, introduces fireflies to help establish a late-evening timeframe. In the last stanza, Riley writes:
“An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray,
an the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away…”
Riley is capturing the fact that most firefly flashing activity occurs between sunset and midnight. In the early morning hours, the number of firefly flashes dwindles to an occasional burst or none at all.
Finding the correct word or words to describe the aerial pyrotechnics of the fireflies has always been a challenge for poets. The analogies in poetry are endless: candles, flickering gold, heat lightnings, sparkles and lamps, to name a few.
In the opinion of Purdue University entomologist Tom Turpin, two poets have really captured the beauty and mystique of firefly displays. One is Paul Fleishman whom in his book Joyful Noise describes the fireflies as:
“Insect calligraphers practicing penmanship” and “Six-legged scribblers of vanishing messages.”
The other is Riley, in his poem Old-fashioned Roses described a summer night and included the following: “The fireflies, like golden seeds are sown about the night.”
Even if we cannot describe the sight as eloquently as Fleishman or Riley, most of us do appreciate seeing luminous beetles decorating the landscape on a summer night.
Submitted by Tom Turpin, Purdue University
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Purdue also has an article about lightning bugs and cancer research.
Ohio State University has a great program for kids about lightning bugs.