“You’ve never seen lightning bugs?” we said in disbelief. No lightning bugs? That was like not knowing Jesus. He said they didn’t have them in the Golden State. Then the Californian went on to tell us he’d never seen lightning bugs before. “What the is a firefly?” said my cousin, Ed Lee. “They’re not fireflies,” said Margaret Ann. He got excited when the front yards were alight with summer lightning bugs.Īll us kids looked at the new boy as though his cheese had slid off his cracker. A kid from California had recently moved into our neighborhood. I remember the first time I ever heard a lightning bug called a “firefly.” I was 11 years old. There are a few neighborhood kids, playing in front yards, trying to catch them with Tupperware.Īnd the memories are getting so thick you have to swat them away like gnats. are where thunderstorms are most frequent, coincidentally lining up where the majority of people who say “lightning bugs.It’s a quiet night in Avondale. You can see that the purple and blue colors within the Midwest and Southern U.S. total lightning density map from 2015-2019 per county below: Image courtesy: VAISALA annual lightning report 2020
There’s a theory that exists that people who call the insects “lightning bugs” reside in an area with the most frequent lightning strikes on average. Check out the regional map from author Josh Katz below: Image courtesy: It’s thought that the name attached to the insect could have something to do with which phenomenon occurs most frequently in that region. The flickering light of these insects aren’t just a coincidence in nature either, but they do it to attract mates and ward off predators. The more food available means the more fireflies that thrive! If the weather is too hot or dry, this can be detrimental to the larvae causing them to die before they can hatch, or cause a delay in their emergence. Wet springs are also helpful to fireflies since the larvae feed on things like snails, slugs and pill bugs, which all come out when it rains. If the winter is mild, odds are you’ll have a much larger firefly population since there’s a greater liklihood of the larvae having survived the cold winter. This happens because fireflies are cold blooded, which means they require and depend on warmth in their environment to function on a daily basis.ĭid you know? During late May on the Smoky Mountains there is a synchronous firefly display that you can attend.ĭepending on the weather, these insects will appear sooner depending on if we had a mild winter or not. When overnight temperatures are warm, fireflies can thrive with an abundance of flashes of light, but on nights where temperatures drop into the 50s for example, their flashes occur a lot slower and less frequent. Weather plays a role not only when during the year you see them, but in how frequent you see the flashes of light in a given night. This is when temperatures start to warm up enough for the larvae to emerge from the ground. These insects love the warm, humid weather. This is why they are sometimes referred to as the “muggy bugs,” and why summertime is the perfect time of year where they like to come out ranging from mid May to mid June.
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