blink. blink.
by bam
the jar i keep at the ready. it is my firefly jar, and like any bug collector worth her wings, i equip it with essentials. it is full-service, my firefly catcher is. there’s grass and leaves and holes for air, poked into the lid.
i always let the critter go; all i ask for is one good blink from there inside his glass-walled confinement. then he’s out, no bail, scot free. he’s out to blink in cool night air.
i have long been a collector of the firefly, the lightning bug, the glow worm. take your pick, the name that is; the blinking-bellied beetle is, for me, the very definition of a busy summer’s night. and any hour now, summer is the thing that will be upon us.
so let us start the summer rumble with a romp for blinking things that light up the night. in short staccato bursts of golden yellow glow.
when the softlight of the evening goes to violet-gray, the blink-blink bugs begin their nightly show. one minute all is as is. the next, there is a flash, a blink, a flying thing with belly all like a lantern.
is it not the darnedest thing that, when sitting at the drawing board, God thought to make a bug with taillights? a gentle nudge if you’re out in darkness that just like that a burst of light, of hope, will come. a promise blinking in the distance. don’t give up. hope is here, the taillight tells you, even when you cannot see it. and then, the flash. the chase for light is on.
just the other night, not thinking anything at all of the summer’s blinking business, i caught that telltale flash out of the corner of my eye. oh my goodness, i hollered to my boys, the lightning bugs are back. quick, go get a jar.
i stalked the here-one-minute-gone-the-next Photuris pyralis, p. pyralis for short, the only insect known to humankind capable of turning off and on that beacon.
that night i came up short. never did fill my jar. but just last night, out of the violet-blue, i caught a blink right over my shoulder, cupped my hand, swooped, trapped me a momentary prisoner for my ball jar jail. darn thing never did let out a blink.
most likely, i was not his type.
the blink, you know, is all about romance. yup, it’s true. or as much as romance traipses on the scene when we are talking flying bugs.
the blink is more or less morse code for come on baby, light my fire. hmm. wonder if ol’ jimmy morrison was thinking firefly back in ’66 when he penned those blinkin’ words? who knew the doors were putting words to mr. p pyralis?
here’s how the blinking goes: boy bug blinks. girl bug, crouched down near the ground, waits the pre-determined pause (5.5 seconds in one species). she blinks back. he blinks and blinks and blinks. he has, as it were, found what he’s looking for. a girl with which to do the blinking thing. and then the blank-ing thing.
here’s how you can tell if your firefly is a he or a she: if he flies and blinks, chances are he’s a he. she, proper lady, perches, waits. stays low to ground, sometimes blinks. he flies and blinks like a fool for love, which in fact he is.
so here’s your he/she quiz: if it’s an airborne off-on beetle, it is a _______(fill in the blink).
there are, i’ll have you know, some 136 species of fireflies. each one blinks in its own way. if we studied fireflies, you and i, we could tell which species by the way he blinks and she blinks back.
some firefly he’s flash what looks like the letter J. some flash in rapid-fire flashes. in the former, she flashes back but one flash. in the latter, she deigns to give him double flash. sort of, one if it’s me, two if it’s not. it’s as if paul revere, too, studied the lightning bug.
oh by the way, not only is it the he’s who do most of the blinking, there are, jiminy cricket, 50 he’s for every she. the she’s are vastly outnumbered. which is why she can sometimes be so blinkingly evil.
say she’s hungry. say she sees a blinking thing who is not her kind. sly devil, she; she might blink in pure downright imitation, and make him think she is another. so, when in he swoops, she lets him have it. she zaps him with anesthetizing juice and then sucks his insides out. egad. the bug world is so nasty.
all because of a blink gone blooey.
i have no clue if you, like me, have ever wondered how the blinking works, but just in case, i did a little digging. it’s really rather simple. and quite astonishing.
seems the firefly has a light-emitting organ just below its belly. in a simple chemical soup stirred inside that very pot, a chemical called luciferin, is triggered by an enzyme called luciferase. plain old oxygen provides the fuel, and a blast of energy found in every living cell, something called atp, creates the flash.
kaboom, it’s flying bioluminescence. which, by the way, is a big fancy word that basically means inner glow.
because the flying things are not willing to divulge their little secrets, no one’s sure if the on-off switch is due to the firefly controlling the oxygen supply, or if there is some little nerve cell that triggers all the blinking.
seems i am not the only one mesmerized by the night lights.
the ancient chinese caught piles of them and stuffed them in nearly see-through lanterns so they could see where they were walking in what otherwise would have been the dark.
the aztecs, enchanted and enlightened, are said to have used the term metaphorically, meaning “spark of knowledge in a world of ignorance or darkness.”
europeans, superstitious lot, thought that if a firefly flew in a window, it meant that someone in the house would die.
native americans, meanwhile, smeared the glowy goo on their faces and chests for decoration.
it is, you see, a most versatile bug. and not one bit dangerous, not unless of course you happen to be a male p. pylaris. then you’d best beware of blinking lights low to the ground. be careful, buster, upon whom you pounce.
there is much, so much, more to say, about the little blinking lights of summer nights.
did you know, for instance, that there is rarely seen a lightning bug west of the middle of kansas, making the firefly a purely eastern entertainment?
and can you imagine that the two rare chemicals, aka the lightning juices, luciferin and luciferase, are highly sought-after (a st. louis chemical company will pay a penny per lightning bug, with a $30 bonus if you get up to 75,000 bugs) and they’re being used in cutting-edge research for cancer, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis and heart disease?
it is all too much, it makes me woozy. this little bug is so amazing. and you just thought it blinked and blinked like some old roadside sign.
good thing my jar is always at the ready.
firefly collectors unite. anyone else keep a jar with holes poked in the lid, always at the ready? any little people care to come join me for a firefly romp? what better way to start the real true summer? i’m thinkin’ there’s at least one firefly/lightning bug tale tucked up in a jar somewhere, high up on a shelf in the hall closet. and while we’re at it, can anyone west of the middle of kansas tell us if it’s true, the blinking things go dark once they get near the rockies or beyond? dang, if true, i am so sorry. i cannot imagine a summer that doesn’t blink.
I remember collecting a jarful when I was a just a “new reader” and thinking that I could get enough to keep next to my bed so I could read at night after the “lights out!” call came floating up from the big people downstairs…..ah well…the little bugs couldn’t put out enough light to see my nose much less a printed page. I fell asleep waiting to see if they would all light up at once…but fell asleep myself and then felt sad for their sacrifice the next morning. They were burned out. It did seem like such a great idea the night before. 😦
I never once saw a firefly until I moved to the midwest for college and beyond. Can you imagine, a firefly-free childhood? Well. They make me about eight years old whenever I see them still. We were catching them just two nights ago around here, me and my bug-phobic children. Something about fireflies makes them accessible, universally loved. Really they’re rather creepy looking little beetles, but when they do that glowing thing, man, I just go crazy.Summertime and bugs pretty much go together. My 8-year-old son brought home the end of a school science unit on mealworms–his pupa. He had basically bonded with this mealworm over the last weeks of school, telling me about his tricks, his personality, how they were friends. We watched the pupa hatch starting on Monday–they turn into fairly impressive black beetles. Midday Tuesday he wasn’t completely hatched. Still struggling, writhing to free himself of–what exactly–he wasn’t quite a beetle yet and he couldn’t seem to get upright in his jar. He made me ponder the whole wildly weird metamorphosis thing, and why on earth it appeared to be such a struggle, and to what end, and why would God have created the process in the first place, and why do bugs go through this tremendous transformation which looks so, well, how else to put it, character-shaping? Too many things to wonder about a bug.Anyway I added leaves, bark, sticks, I rolled this half-pupa feet-downward, I gave him lettuce (beautiful local organic lettuce no less), I hoped against hope that this stunted bug wasn’t as close to being dead as it looked. By today he was still not quite a beetle, and was wiggling his little legs slower and slower still, my son peering in at him once in awhile, insisting he was fine, he just needed to flip over. By the time his buddy arrived today and took one look at him, he declared succinctly and with the realism of a nine-year-old, that bug is dead.Hmmm. To bury or not to bury?Meantime my son has also captured a caterpillar. Amazing suction-cup feet, rippling body, the quite uncanny ability to lift its head, whole front half even, up to stretch out and look around. Quite a piece of work, the caterpillar. Yesterday it ate most of a giant cottonwood leaf in its jar (looking as though it cut the leaf with scissors in interesting patterns), then somehow got away. Through the airholes, we surmised. We found a veritable trail of chomped leaves and knew he was chowing his way through the yard to cocoonhood. Imagine our surprise when my son and his buddy found “the caterpillar” today, much bigger and fatter than yesterday, and caught him again, returning him to his leafy confines. Now he is named Snuggles.Bugs don’t, as lamcal notes, really belong in jars. But they sure are fascinating. They sure do give us a practically endless supply of wonderment. It is that wonderment at an impossibly self-illuminating bug, or an impossibly bizarre metamorphosis, or the impossible fascination of watching a caterpillar eat a leaf–it is these kinds of utter wonders which–for me–define summer, characterize its sweet and fleeting qualities of discovery, of awe, of quiet, staring scrutiny into the dirt. I am eating it up.
Read an interesting article in the 6/19 Washington Post about: Nature Deficit Disorder–which is children growing up without the wonder and knowledge about nature of which the above essay and comments speak.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/18/AR2007061801808.html
That is an interesting article and book isn’t it. I got so enraptured about bugs I forgot to say wow, what a trove of interesting facts about fireflies. I love them even more now. Thanks bam!
oh, lordy, everybody, back at the table after my day in the country, and what do i find but a whole stew of bug tales. sooo delicious. the tales, people, not the bugs. if i were a firefly i’d be blinking right now. that’s how delighted i am by all that’s above….first, lamcal, did you know that had you been a little reading falling to sleep in southeast asia, thailand or malaysia, you might have gone to sleep by the light of the glow, the big fat synchronized glow. for the species of firefly over there is one of the ones that do a big fat synchronized, okay-pals-at-the-sound-of-the-whistle-everyone-blink. yes, yes, they glow en masse. and some down in south america too. but we here in these united states are independent critters, and so are our bugs. they glow one at a time. not as a whole glowing republic. and, blessed jcv, the points you bring up i could ponder all day. the metamorphosis, the painful struggle from one someone to becoming another someone. is there any birth, or re-birth, that comes without struggle without pain? i swear to God, why don’t we all just set up desks out in the woods, or the so-called lawn and study nature and learn everything we need to learn. it’s all there. every metaphor and wisdom in the book. i love your bug tales. love them so much.yes, summer is a time for bugs breaking out of glass jars, or dying within, sacrificed at the great altar of a child’s discovery. i shall have to zip over there to the post, carol, to read more and more on the sad subject of nature deficit disorder. how sad a thing to think of all the metaphor and wisdom lost in a paved-over, digital world????? thanks for making my return from the farm so full of joy here at the table. maybe we should put together a traveling bug circus and we could all bring along our favorite pet bugs and let them do their tricks under the big little top tent?