so as you said I'm from Three Rivers Park District and more specifically I work at Elm Creek Park Preserve at the Nature Center their Eastman Nature Center uh Elk Creek Park preserve uh preserves over 5 200 acres of land it's the largest part of the Three Rivers Park District manages I'm gonna give you an idea of the size it's about the size of 5200 football fields or enough room for the Vikings to break our hearts 5 200 times and so it's a very large Park and because of that we have a lot of unique animals a lot of great habitat and some of the habitat we have is really ideal for a fire advice so for the past five or six years now we've done Firefly festivals we've done Firefly Heights we've gone out and collected fireflies so it's been a big part of what we do in the summer I am also the uh one of the co-hosts of the park districts podcast the wandering naturalist and so part of that is we did do a series on fireflies and we were lucky enough to be able to interview one of the top Firefly researchers in the world which was really amazing so I'm excited to share some of the things I've learned both from her and from our experience leading different Firefly programs because fireflies are amazing creatures they're really as my PowerPoint presentation says they're a light in the dark they have lit up our imagination through countless centuries when you think back to stories about fairies fireflies really are of inspiration for them they have lit up our ideas for medicine and food safety which I'll talk about a little bit and they're even led to the way into the Stars trying to find alien light for dancing and so there's a lot of amazing things they can do and what I want to talk a little bit about today is just some of the really cool things that make fireflies special because the best way to conserve an animal is to get people to care about it and to get people to care about it you have to know about it I also want to talk about some ways that people living at home or the city so it used to help conserve fireflies provide good habitat for them and so my goal is to kind of touch you all for roughly 30 minutes uh feel free to write me questions if you have any questions and then we'll have about 15 minutes for a q a if you want to go beyond that that is your choice but I would respect your videos and afterwards as well so I'll let you know when that time is up and then you all can make the decision up if you want more questions or announcements um but again if you have questions uh at any point so talking about fireflies we call them fireflies In Minnesota where I grew up in South Florida we call them lightning bugs and it turns out South Florida is actually more correct you don't get to say that about Florida very often but um fire lightning bug is a more specific term so a firefly talks about uh all the beetles in this family that's called Lamprey and that includes glow worms which is a really popular little stuffed doll for kids those are more common in Europe where you have the female who lights up that doesn't fly in the mailstone we do have at least one species of all over the United States in the Appalachian Mountains um and then the ones that flash on and off like we have here but more specific term for them is lightning bug if you call them Firefly it's okay you know you call your your duct Tech moose game that's a great up signieri doing things wrong right um and so fireflies are neither a lightning but they're neither bug or a fly they aren't actually and the reason why is if you look at uh the picture or the drawing I have on my slide or if you're in the room when you look at one of the preserved fireflies look at their back you'll see they have a straight line going down their back that straight line is made by their outer wings called the elytra those are more of a hard shell and underneath are two more Wings they fly out so that's pretty characteristic of beetles now there's over 2 000 species of fireflies in the world in North America there's about 120 species and a Minnesota we're actually not sure there hasn't been a lot of research done on our insects in Minnesota dragonflies are starting to get there we're getting a better idea even dragonflies we don't it certainly spots to all the species we have and those are really big fireflies will be like oh it's a firefight it's great it turns out there's lots of species we don't know quite how many in Minnesota we think there's about six main groups uh of uh fireflies in Minnesota that's there maybe one but I'll talk a little bit more about those six main groups that we have and um we have found most of those groups are preserve which is just North of here and so they're probably around this area as well now to start off with fireflies and start off with understanding how we can provide habitat Forum we have to know about their lifestyle because if you're going to have fireflies you have to have habitat for every single part of their life cycle and so that starts with their eggs which are laid in damp Woods you have to have Woodland that is kind of moist and wet with a lot of rotting logs around it or fireflies want to lay their eggs there and that's because when they hatch they turn into a larva a larva is a young insect it's a fireplace okay caterpillar for a butterfly and these larvae hunt through these damn woods and they go under rotten logs and their primary food intensity things like worms roly-polies slugs snails things like that instead of the eggs glow the eggs glow but larva glows the pupil glows and some of the adults uh and so that is one of the things that makes fireflies fireflies almost every life stage looks uh I'll get into a little bit more about what we call our dark fireflies or the adult stones um but yes they glow and it's a horn they're all poisonous and so if you think about you know some of our insects that are really famous really poisonous like monarchs how do they tell us their poisons they're great they're bright colored they're orange but that doesn't work during night and these Critters are out at night and the reason doesn't look at night is because uh we see color with what's called combs in our eyes and Cones are great having crisp clear images they're great at thinking about color they don't work when there's not a long way so then we switch to our rods at night and those are a little bit blurrier they're good at seeing at the uh dim light but they can't see any color so when there's no light around you can't see color so these Critters can be as bright as they want but an ice cream flash will and so when a Predator Gets near these eggs they start glowing I've actually never seen that unfortunately I tried to find anything I haven't found it yet I have seen the larva glow we have seen them local and if they're Disturbed they're uh abdomen start splashing and then for the first time last year I saw the people go it was really amazing I was leaving one of our Firefly hikes and everything was a little delayed because we had a really Cold Spring last year and so as we're walking through the woods there's just these solid points of green lights on the ground what is that was like hyped up to it and they were the pupil and they were just glowing it was really really neat um and in all those cases they were all in woods that had a lot of uh leaves on the ground trees that had fallen over places we'd love to be more natural because that provide some of the food and the habitat and security and then they'll become adults adults need a slightly different habitat they prefer to have Woods that's on the border of tall grass and that gives them places to March now in Minnesota as I said we have at least six different uh Firefly groups and so you can see uh at the top we've got lucidota spots it's a fancy scientific way of saying with some kind of species we don't know what uh so lucidoda is the genus name uh we've got Cairo paiga and elytnia uh um those are what we call dark fireflies the adults have lost their ability to produce light and we'll talk about why that is a little bit there's a couple of hypotheses that are really fascinating but we do actually have these ones present you'll see them more during the day uh and they won't actually flush have you seen them before no my friend was telling me that she was seeing fireflies during the day yes and I'll catch the glowing ones the flashing ones in the bottom as well during the day but the dark ones are a lot more common you can tell the difference both from the photos and then I've got a couple of the dark ones here if you want to look closer um you can notice our species on the bottom the ones that have an F because they flash they have yellow on their Elijah on those two are different ways the dark ones don't have any yellow and can we close that so if you uh catch a firefly you look at it a way you can tell it's a firefly is they have these big shields around their head they kind of have that little bit of yellow or pinkish you can see they all have that so that's a pretty good sign you've got a firefly and then whether it's latches or not look at the a lighter these upper wings with a straight line down the middle if it's all black then it's not going to flash as an adult if it's got yellow it will flash at least in Minnesota foreign in terms of habitat we talked about that a little bit they love Forest clearings that have big patches of tall grass or shrubs that the females can kind of perch on places to rest with Forest around it uh they want moist Forest around it for their eggs and their larvae and their Pupa because again they need that voice soil to grow and develop stream edges are a good place for them to be found as well or Wetland edges Marsh edges Pond edges whenever we have a development that comes in and there's a pond there with tall grass you won't have fireflies there for you know probably decades but eventually they might move into that spot we'll talk about why it takes so long again in a little bit um at the edge of suburbs or even cities like around here I see there's a lot of trees around here um City Hall a lot of parks you have those will all be places where you could potentially find fireplace the important thing is having lots of trees and patterns of moist soil I was so dry here like this back then excellent question um and there's not necessarily a scientific answer for that so there can be some anecdotal information and some of the anecdotal information is that when we did our Firefly hikes we saw a lot less of our two common species but we saw a lot more of our rare species um and so our two common speeches are what we normally think of they've got the yellowish green and the Flash or flash flash um the rare species actually has an orange Amber Flash and I'd only ever seen it once before in my six year to do a firefly night because this year I saw 50 60 of them now as to whether that's because of the drought or not or it could be that we had you know uh all that moisture early in the spring that could have had an impact it's really hard to put it down to one thing uh probably our best guess is that when it's drier it has an impact on them because they're going to be less slugs and snails and rolly pollies for them to eat and set up an actor larva but we're making assumptions about that and the truth is we have that much much bigger impact on them it's going to be the fact that the Earth has received warmer in general and making weather more chaotic and that lights at night and they're extremely sensitive to yes I understand absolutely when we talked on the podcast through several different Firefly experts when we asked them what's the biggest fireflies lights at night and pesticide uses the thing they all said they kept repeating that we didn't ask them to say that or anything have they ever thought to each other before yet either well those are the things that always came up in terms of what they eat like I said for the larva they didn't eat snails and earthworms um roly-poly soft buddy creatures how they eat was really cool they've got these uh uh kind of needle-like mandibles they're called that pinch in and grab their prey and they're Hollow and they inject it full of digestive enzymes so if they grab the snail the snail is oftentimes bigger than a larva and they'll grab onto the squishy part of the snail and they'll inject it and turn into a snail shake they just inject the insides and then they slip it out it's really really cool that is right it's awesome it's the whole snail or just a small part uh they will eventually digest the entire inside of the snail and so it's a pretty good meal for them when they get it yeah they're not it's not like they're out there eating 10 sales a minute or 100 sales a night one snail is probably good enough um but yeah they they the skin space and the hard part stay the inside's all messy um the adults some adults eat nectar morals to adults as far as we can tell don't eat it all and so even though they have mouth Parts it does seem like a lot of adults will actually not eat their whole purpose is just to breathe um and so again we think of the adults as being kind of the penultimate part of the life cycle where we think of it being multiple times for humans that's true uh for fireflies and most insects it's really The larva is the main part of my life it's like over there eating and they're growing do we know how long they stay adults as adults indeed anywhere for two to three weeks okay as larva they might be larva for six months okay so the majority of their life is environment all right I wish I could go right wouldn't it be amazing are they all um all the fireflies I know of are native there may be a very Southern border of Minnesota some species might slowly be moving North as it's getting warmer but fireflies move incredibly slowly um one of the things that um makes it really hard to get fireflies back once you've built development or you've built a city you've built something is they don't they stay where they are so if you have this pond that's full of fireflies and that construction happens there the fireflies get wiped out you might not have another fireplace move into that for five years ten years even decades because they just sort of spread out but depending on proximity of other requirements Perfection goes if you've got one that's you know 100 yards of the white shirt a little bit better but if you know usually decide the development you're talking about that stuff to kind of uh keep them from that area for a while your developing an area they leave the pond and there were fireflies around are they disturbed by the construction around them and will they abandon it that depends a little bit on how much the land is impacted and if there's still going to be food in the area for their young um they're not enough data may not survive okay you know they're not going to fly somewhere else um what would be the thing that would really impact them the most is that a lot of uh people started putting a lot of fertilizer that's inside cigarettes Anthony lights on at night uh because the lights are underneath they can't see each other Flash um that's what the new things grow because well earthworms are not needed you're 100 correct that like boosts their populations yeah it's kind of like a bonus it just arrived so again that's a really complicated question to answer by a little bit you're correct that there are no native terrestrial species of earthworms there is one native species of Aquatica which sounds like an oxymoron but they're in the hand of the family uh and that's because of course the glaciers came through um when we look at other animals of the lion or fruits or food like a wood which is a bird um there are populations of undevity gone up because even but it does move up uh salamanders are really famous for uniforms there's a lot of evidence that because there's so much earthworms who knows that's actually calculations to go down and it's because the more they eat the faster they grow and so we end up with these older salamanders growing large enough fast enough to actually Generations so saying if earthworms are going to bring populations up or not I think there's it can be one or the other without studying you can't say and in terms of fireflies I'd say that other factors limit them so much the Earth from one of the supervisors it's more of a alternative food source compared to what they would have eaten shortly because we would have had alternative Foods a little bit much more common but with earthworms destroying the habitats uh those food sources like roly-polies and other soft body features are probably less common beliefs to be historically things very complicated okay ingest so what you're saying is threats are more nutritious um they probably a lot of I'm glad you all know about this but I would argue that her firms are the second most destructive animal in Minnesota um and a lot of it has to do with them removing our Duff layers the pants can't grow a lot of it has to do original so much in your Park is because of earthlings Earth forms of buffer to create a feedback cycle to support each other if you do have work rooms so they're an interesting critter now when you watch them flying uh if you see them in the air those are almost always males the males fly through the air uh as adults the major main reason for them black and just to say to the females look at me I'm really cute you should go out of debate um or more scientifically they're saying to say I've got a lot of energy I'm really healthy any Oxygen we have we're gonna have a great chance of survival and the females they have shorter Wings if they have wings some species don't um they tend to be perched on grass or on shrubs or on the ground so if you see a flash it's not moving and it's not flying it's probably a female and she is evaluating the males flying around and they're able to actually judge the flashes down the microscience the judge is the male flashing correctly is it burning enough how does he look and then if she flashes back the male will apply down to her the males aren't as picky because they don't have as much of an investment to get are there other beetles where the females don't like have greens um yes oh yep there's actually quite a few insects out there with females have lost their wings uh there's moths as well if you've ever heard of bag worms the females have lost their wings as well it's a form of uh it's called neonate where they keep their childhood or usable traits like a caterpillar um there's other beetles like I'm gonna give you specifics these shoes around the top of my head um but it tends to be if the female has a way of attracting a male from a distance there's not a lot of something for her to fly so why waste energy flying or making wings a lot of those other species use pheromones and uh in terms of moths some moths and smell the pheromones of female from three miles away um and so that'll draw the males in some people still fly in that case but other species the females goals thanks absolutely um because flashing is really important for the males they have bigger lanterns so if you look on the bottom of our slides the bottom right the right side uh Lantern is the yellow strips the that's the males and the one on the left if you're facing the screen are the females you can see how much smaller the females are because again if you just gotta say yes to them um the males the one who has to kind of show off do the dance moves do all the impressive stuff and he has to find her right um they generally are all in the same habitat so he is flying in the area he knows that she's watching and they're just the males are keeping for looking for that flashlight and once they see that they fly there sometimes it can be a little bit of a race to get to it is similar to the what's the bird thing or they all display oh males yeah I think you know I've never put that uh that together but I can see it as being like that where the males are all in one place so it draws the females in absolutely yeah see that is why you see the fire classes they're all there in one area um so yeah now what really fascinates me is how they glow um I'm actually wondering if it's possible to get the camera turned on briefly because I did bring some stuff to demonstrate some of these things but if it's too hard it's okay I can just do it for the folks in the boardroom um but how they glow um it's called biofluorescence living light and it's one of the most efficient life sources in terms of heat we know they put up pretty much noses and scientists have actually studied them to make more efficient LED light bulbs uh because they can make lights so efficiently and to do it they need several different uh things first off if you remember all the way back to high school or college biology there are things called proteins and proteins are really important because they tell the body what to do and so in this case fireflies in their Lanterns have special proteins called uh luciferin so this is kind of what the Supreme looks like and this is what makes it Glow and it'll glow eventually it'll just take a long time and it needs a few other ingredients to happen and so the first ingredient is uh adenosine triphosate or ATP any ATP we can go for people yeah you eat something your body digested Treads of the sugar that sugar is broken into dtp and ATP is what fuels your body so use breathing uses ATP moving your finger using ATP sitting in my glorious presence uses all that stuff anytime you're using energy it uses that and fireflies are somewhat unique in the fact that other biofluorescent creatures don't need anything for the most part once you have ATV you need oxygen and so options all around us and oxygen is one of the most destructive elements we have to think about rust that caused by oxygen um their option is very oxidative which means it rips ions off of other things and causes the breakdown so steel turns into rust uh if you've ever been to an Apple I'm going to start turning brown that's because oxygen is oxidizing the starch inside the apple and breaking it from starch into sugar so the gravity of your Apple the more sugar you have but that option of doing that so oxygen can create a lot of energy by doing that and then another thing that uh fireflies need is a metal called magnesium um so magnesium is a very highly energetic metal this would be kind of a bright silver a lot of people use a camping um and the reason why is because it catches on fire really really easily so it depends like this it's a nice part it's okay there's so small um yeah if I I could pull one sure fine no I promise not to bring your ability down um so magnesium has a ton of energy somehow it's heavy and if you do this reaction so here's the other idea of how strong magnesium is um they have made bombs out of magnesium for Warfare and the Magnesium Burns so hot it sets the atmosphere outside uh it's really hard to set our atmosphere on fire because it actually and he's able to do that magnesium can even burn underwater so very very strong chemical there and all of that stuff together will create a globe but again like I said it's going to take a lot and fireflies are making their glows within fractions of a second so they need something to speed it up and they need what's called a catalyst uh Catalyst space things up and so their catalyst is called luciferous and this is roughly what Mr brace looks like um and I think Peter model of it and basically it grabs on to the you zipper in the ATP the oxygen magnesium and it gives up a giant hug and it squeezes it together and it speeds it up um and so to give you an idea of just how catalysts work I want a different kind of a catalyst as an example so uh you've all used hydrogen peroxide all right H2O2 uh which means it's water with an extra oxygen on it I promises on your building here I'm just amazed at the point about luciferous being the lightbringer ah where do you think about that name yeah well yeah the right Latin roots I typed in high school I think it would help me so much with Biology and Latin names turns out the scientific names are Black Knights Greek so I took the wrong language but yes a lot of those roots are there and it comes from the same group so let's start an oxygen right now it's water with an extra option it's very unstable and so if I left this overnight the last question would leave and we just have water level okay so it happens naturally but you know it's going to take all time for it to do that so we can speed it up with a catalyst in the Catalyst I'm going to use today is called manganese dioxide it is going to speed this reaction up so I'm gonna pour it in yeah manganese a little different I wish it would make the same sound really it would have worked really great but you pour it in you give it a shake you see how it starts bubbling almost and silly yeah that and can you hear the kissing yeah yeah let me see if we can get over here it's almost at the point where it's boiling now and pretty soon we're trying to see oxygen pouring out of here it's ripping off the oxygen from that water so quick that extra oxygen that this is actually gone from about 70 degrees to about 150 degrees wow really it's kind of that's why I wear a glove and you can steam it up as oxygen starting to just kind of pull off of it we couldn't see that happening before but now we can't catalysts speed things up really really fast and that's what this you separates us it speeds up the process really really fast so fireflies can Flash within micro sentence when they want to their control they have control start and stop start and stop and they stop it by adding something called uh nitrous oxide into their uh lanterns and that cuts off the oxygen and that makes the process stop okay balloon yes there is with chemistry all things are possible and then you could use that okay so um we can probably go back to the PowerPoint now but I love that um I just love the science behind it what else like is it still things are figuring out uh like why exactly magnesium is in there we know it speaks sure so there's still more to learn which can be really fun cycle exactly who doesn't love the Chris although okay we're watching this if there are any just immediately each different Terror that was the nice thing about my Majors study but I didn't say um is this the [Music] um there is a related Beetle um that isn't in the Labor Day family but is really close related it also uses other bioforescent creatures um they use something slightly different because they don't need a TV like fireflies that being said we can inject other species of needles with uh the luciferase uh I think it's the enzyme it might be the protein so there's some similar chemicals in them that will allowed to happen if they have the right protein in the inside so the with those other ones with this exciting not sorry um could it be like parallel or convergent evolution or what like uh same company ancestors okay any common answer at some point and there's a lot of evidence that flashing didn't evolve to find a mate fireflies repurpose it for that flashing of all disabled poisons and so because of that that means that disability was around before there were fireflies to somewhere when that close cousin and fireflies branched off their common ancestor had luciferous of races to it does that kind of answer your question yes yeah so not convergent evolution because they were related at some point you are getting into Logistics too I know I look for this thing as well sometimes um so as to why they glow again they're adults for the most part are going to find a name um and they do different colors and they do different uh patterns based on the species to make sure they're actually finding the right ones um and so uh something that uh is interesting about this chart right here you can see the the male flash patterns in seconds so this top one it flashes and then three seconds it flashes and three seconds it flashes um that's how this female right here can tell between the one that flashes at zero and the one that flashes at six it's a different flashing pattern between species and the females have their own flashing pattern well this can't quite show the reason this Line's so small here is because her flash is less than a second and so the length of the five shingles put out the following out what species and splash you have as well as the pattern and these are all in the photinist group it's called if we go into the tourist group the patterns will be different but they would also vary by apply uh the time they take feature it is and you can use why science actually use high speed cameras to identify them uh that's not a new species service now um another reason again that they will actually stable poison so the back flies into my flash extra when they're younger when they're not about safe black say they're poisonous if somebody eats them they've got something called a buffet toxin same kind of toxic the Toads have so I just called that that makes it taste really bad it makes things sick and some species can even Force blood out of their existence and to make the creature strategies that first it's called reflex breathe uh reflex bleeding now again how they do it it's not just a matter of the time that they're flashing it's also the shapes they make and so if you look at this picture on the right uh the top one for Tinus pyrolis this is one of our most common fireflies you if you've seen Firefly you've probably seen it and so the name is the Big Dipper because it makes J's kind of ditched down and up down and up compare that to for Tinus margin allele more more genelious I can never pronounce Latin even though I took it um it's a relatively just steady Flash the male itself is going up and down but it always flashed at the same point and it's way that's safe so color time and pattern and shape of the flash is all how they're kind of differentiating themselves you know I went to the flight yeah and I saw one particular flyer Firefly that was like on its way on his way like to the group and he was flashing super fast and I just thought that he was excited I'm go I'm there oh you guys wait for me right it probably was released um I'm thinking that uh even a different just I'd say that was probably a full tourists is what we call I feel terrorist does tend to do a faster flashing and we can see the difference in the woods when we do our hype we'll be in the woods we're kindness is mostly and it's flash flash flash and then we'll go out to the edge of the woods where the prayers were put choruses and it becomes Clash of Clan and so it's really cool to seeing that difference we're going to be nice of every species in the world or other beetles beetles are actually one of the hardest issues to identify because with more beetles than the other animal in the world um and then for most or for a lot of species you have to use a microscope and look at the reproductive parts yeah and so it's just it can be tough they don't flash the morse code to tell you what yeah they don't they don't now this is my favorite part of fireflies uh because it turns out fireflies a lot I just always find it fascinating When Animals try to see each other and unfortunately scientists had to name these two fireflies very similarly we have photinus which does a single Flash and we have Phil touris which does a double flash let me turn this down sorry there we go um and so photinus is a little bit smaller than photos and photinis makes in Spoonful toxins no problem it's got lots of poison unfortunately for tourists are not making uh glasses but they are so poisons and they're poisonous because they got that poison from their mothers and so the mothers have to eat a poisonous Firefly they absorb that poison they put it in their eggs they get really desperate for this person sometimes when they're young and survive and so what happens as early in the season everybody's being nice and honest it's going great so tightness is flashing a single time volturas is doing a double flash everybody's on having a good time but then once for tourist female mates he doesn't we need to find another filterus male they don't need to mate once and so then that's what she starts to lie she starts doing a double Flash and she starts doing a single Flash she copies the flash of both Titans to attract to attract that nail and when the photonists see that he's like and he lies down and then and she absorbs his poison now if he realizes his mistake fast enough he can escape I've actually seen him Escape uh if he sees it fast enough they can create this white sticky dude that comes out of their neck she doesn't like their neck and that jams up her mandibles for about 10 minutes she can't he doesn't go fly away because I've seen that happen exactly so they've been doing this and not long enough that he's developed that's the best time to get someone that's crazy to make it more complicated anymore all their females are gone and the one of the quirks of insect biology is that the last male to meet with a female gets to be the father of the Yanks and so they want to find them for tourist emails and they genetically know that she started imitating the one with flash at once so if they start flashing us and then if they get a single flash they're like all right and they fly down and they're hoping it's this for tourists but the for tourist females think she's just attracted to put Tiger's male which means that the tourist male that was lying might be eaten so as soon as he lands I know they get the confusing right as soon as he lands he does a double flash like oh I'm just kidding about one of you and sometimes it gets so maybe sometimes I'm just very Shakespearean it is it is it's complicated which is just to me really really fun stop where does it even go from there you know yeah what's next so then it leads back to our guts uh so the for tourist female that's doing online is such an aggressive predator scientific require the air sanction Nails out of the air signs of scenery problems with spider webs and getting the tub over with spiders or the fireflies trapped into spiderweights and one hypothesis for some of these dark fireflies don't flash during the day is that they just never really kind of took the flash thing they maybe just kept their pheromones but there's a few of these species where they kind of flash for a couple of days and that leads to the thought that these have more poison than our flashing ones do that means they'd be a better Target for victorious to get as much points as possible she probably used to hunt them and so they would stay up later to avoid her and so she would stay up later and then they would stay up even later until they are forced to be up during the day comes to avoid being predated by filterus feelings now during the day you're Flash doesn't work very well so they've switched back to their ancient method of finding each other which is fair among theirselves so is this one growing up history that just is really cool and um yeah it's it's pretty amazing it's happened all over our country and you thought Days of Our Lives wasn't so far no you just said I don't watch the fireplace now as we talked about they are declining unfortunately over development and like pollution especially light pollution is really awful for them when everybody has their security lights on it makes it really hard to find each other flash that's one of the most disruptive things we have our likes of paint the good news about light pollution is the easiest pollution to solve because as soon as you turn up your light the pollution's gone um and so one of the things a lot of scientists advocate for who study fireflies is you can still have your lights for security but get them on motion sensors because then it's dark when you don't need it and the fireflies can be around and then when you do need it it turns on automatically it actually motion sensing lights are better for security anyway because that's kind of shocks people um habitat loss again they don't go back to their habitats if they're disrupted for a long time because they don't travel so I have that loss can have a huge impact on them pesticides very it's one of the leading causes of their Decline and then historically commercial harvesting companies used to pay the uh kids something like a nickel for every 10 pounds or 100 pounds of fireflies they sent in by mail because that recipient is so important Lucifer in it was originally used to make sure can do the same because it lights up in the presence of ATP because it lights up on a canned foods you're on your test it means there's bacteria that can and it's going to go wrong so they use it for food safety we still do nowadays and we use an artificial luciferate it's been used to find cancer do cancer studies so it'll light up because of all the activity that cancer cells create so it's used for them now we use the artificial version which helps the fireflies out but it came from that and getting back to the Stars NASA has actually put them on uh sensors with the idea that living things in space will have ATP and so they've got a little camera little watch for a glow if that ever blows it means that that sensor protein space is found ATP maybe it's a living thing like bacteria as to what we can do turn off your lights if you're not at night if you don't need them get the lights that are on uh sensors if you do need them uh something that cities that become really bad LEDs are very directional and they're so cheap but not ones they reduce light pollution they've actually increased it by a huge amount they run more towards the blue light spectrum which is more like daylight which disrupts our sleeping and fireflies able to see each other and because they're so cheap cities actually put in New Orleans than they used to so you end up with more like overall so if you are going to do LEDs fight the temptation to put in more and also try to buy them more towards the yellow light spectrum warmer late is better for fireflies see if you haven't had anything wondering if there's some kind of the film that can go over like yeah uh blue acetine or whatever it's like a blue film or Red film can work that disrupts less uh the blue film areas it takes away the light from coming out the Red film makes it more reddish and red disrupts night vision uh less um and so that can be something you put on light bulbs if you already have light bulbs is that what you're talking about oh I'm just thinking about like street lights that's available that they could just save yourself there's I was going to say like aren't there uh specific shapes of Street lamps that directs the lake directly downward that way it's not going up which house and that makes a huge difference yep there are coverage they'll put in I've even seen where they start to cover the sides except for the side they want the light to come out of to reduce as much as possible if you do that that works really well as long as you're not putting more lights sure so yeah it's kind of planning uh there's a whole dark sky group in Minnesota um some friends of mine are scientists that work for them that are very active in it that have a lot of information about cities can reduce their night pollution um because that's a huge thing for Stars human safety and Wildlife um try not to mow so much long grass of the fireflies friends and it's your friends you don't have to mow you're having sticks or some wands in your yard uh those are all places where then the young can live and so having a messy corner of your yard is what they're starting to call it is a great way to encourage fireflies and you can actually certify your property as a firefly habitat by going to firefly.org certified and they will give you a sign and they'll give you a whole PDF specific for your area and how to make your yarn or your fireplace some of our references from today and then for more information you can go check out episodes 54-56 from the wandering edges podcast the QR code links there or you can go to Three Rivers parks.link podcast and it'll take you to the appropriate act on your device and again there's some amazing scientists on that podcast who specialize in fire advice and then this is not information people want to have any follow-up questions