LINCOLN, Mass.—Watching fireflies is one of the joys of summer! Firefly larvae is also important for gardeners and farmers.

“Firefly larvae are voracious carnivores, feeding on a variety of soft-bodied invertebrates, including snails, slugs and earthworms,” according to “Conserving the Jewels of he Night, Guidelines for Protecting Fireflies in the United States and Canada.”   “Because of their large appetites and preference for snails and slugs, fireflies can be highly beneficial in gardens and agricultural settings.” Despite the adults being toxic they also contribute to the diet of other animals including spiders.

Yet little is known about their populations. Are they growing or shrinking? What could lead to changes in their populations? Want to help find answers to those questions? Two citizen science projects are gearing up to answer those questions and anyone can help. 

Mass Audubon FIREFLY WATCH

Mass Audubon has teamed up with researchers from Tufts University to track the fate of these amazing insects. With help from the public, they hope to learn about the geographic distribution of fireflies and what environmental factors impact their abundance.  How to help?

“It is a pretty easy system,” said Alexandra Dohan, Firefly Watch Project Coordinator. “Anybody can participate through our website. We ask that you go out once a week and make observations.”

You note the date and time of when you’re watching, Dohan said. Did you see fireflies or not? Did you see single flash patterns or different flash patterns? There are something like 2,000 different species of fireflies in the world and each one has an individual flash pattern.

Different types of fireflies become active at different times through the summer, she explained. In New England, the earliest flashing fireflies show up in late May to early June; others will appear in June and July.

Different types of fireflies are also active at different times of the night. Some begin flashing at dusk and remain active for less than an hour, while others start later and remain active until midnight. Early risers report seeing fireflies at 4 a.m. 

For Firefly Watch, it doesn’t matter when you observe and record. It might be fun to observe at different times of the evening and see if you can notice a difference in the fireflies you see. If you do this, each time should be its own observation entry.

“We don’t have any specific long-term goals for the data,” Dohan said. “It gets used by various researchers for different projects where they might be looking for maybe the earliest firefly start in a particular area, or what’s the peak time of year to look for fireflies in a given area. Anybody who likes watching fireflies can participate through our website.”

For information on the Mass Audubon Firefly Watch type “Mass Audubon Society Firefly Watch” in the search bar and click on the link.

Xerces’s Society FIREFLY ATLAS  

The Xerces Society has launched a project called Firefly Atlas, which is both a community science project allowing members of the public to share firefly surveys and observation data but it is also a data portal for scientists and land managers to share data as well, said Richard Joyce, co-coordinator of the Firefly Atlas.

“Firefly Atlas provides a protocol that gets a little more into the weeds and gathers both photographs of the insects in hand and flash pattern details to identify the species,” Joyce said. “We have over 170 species within the Lampyridae or firefly family.”

Several years ago the Xerces Society and some partners did preliminary cultivation assessments for about 130 of those, species. They found 18 species to be of conservation concern.

The Firefly Atlas Project has 13 focal species that have a threatened or are within a threatened category mostly because they occur in limited areas, he explained. The one species that is in the Midwest is the cypress firefly which is found from Mississippi up into Indiana and Illinois in forested wetlands and is only found in a couple of other floodplain forests. 

“We’re hoping that members of the public will become a little more curious about the fireflies they have in their backyards and realize there is more diversity there than they might realize and think a little more about the conservation needs of fireflies such as reducing artificial light at night or light pollution, reducing exposure of fireflies to pesticides.”

For information on the Xerces’s Society visit www.fireflyatlas.org