Illuminating the sordid story of a bug

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

 – Mark Twain

 Nothing says summer better than the green flashes of light hovering  around fields and at the edges of the forest, the light breeze pushing the warm humid air away, the sound of the tree frogs and crickets.  But behind every pretty picture there is a sordid story and this story belongs to that crowd of insects flashing their little green luminescent tails at night.

In Ohio we are talking about your photinus pyralis.  We call them lightning bugs, fireflies, moon bugs and yet they are neither flies, nor bugs, but beetles. 

On warm evenings floating waist high they scrawl a J shape in light with their insect butt, just light-no heat.  For these flashy lovers each light in the night can lead to  sex or maybe death. Sometimes pretty flashes from female lightning bugs will attract males,  not for a date,  but as a meal of  fresh meat particularly if they are from a different species. Potential mates are also fair game. A ravenous female will even break off an active mating session to turn around and wolf down her paramour, mid-coitus. (who knew they were such jerks?).

 Why the cannibalism? Why the predator behavior?  Lightning bugs are relatively slow-flying insects that carry the equivalent of a neon billboard on their behinds.  Without chemical weapons, they would be easy prey for bats, birds, and a whole host of other predators.  Apparently eating other lightning bugs makes you taste really bad.

Maybe it was their upbringing.  When young, the lightning bug was a very hungry little larvae (known as a glow-worm) prowling about the underbrush hunting for worms, slugs, snails and anything else it could seize with its mandibles and inject with a paralysis-inducing venom.

But I don’t want to think about that. 

I want to think about how the stars fall to the earth on a warm summer night.

 I want to look out to the tree tops and see the small lightning flashes on the night sky through my bedroom window.

I want to hear the tree frogs and the crickets and fall asleep with a lullaby of nature.