Firefly in da House

My friends would know that I live in a kampung area. As a kid I had tons of fun catching dragonflies, setting traps to catch birds, digging earthworms to fish at the nearby river, etc etc.

As I grew up I realised that these creatures were just disappearing….. Maybe its the urbanization, the climate change, whatever. So it was quite a surprise when a lone firefly flew into my house on one fine night.

I caught it and took some photos of it :)

Tried to take one with the lights off, but the “glow” didn’t come out too well. You can see the 2 strips of green light near the bottom of the insect and the ARE bright if you switch off the surrounding lights.

Then I thought: “Is this really a firefly?” Did some googling and found this image:

The scientific name is Pyractomena angulata for this variety. Not exactly the same but I did learn that there are many variety of fireflies… So maybe the one I caught was the Asian variety :)

Some facts about these cute insects:

The light they emit is almost 100% efficient. i.e. almost all the energy is converted to light and not to heat  and so it is not even warm. Fireflies are also used in the research of cancer, multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. Useful little bugger eh?

I did check my garden and on SOME nights you can actually see about 20 of these fellas glowing and gathering around a tree. Couldn’t take a picture of it as a normal compact camera just could not capture the blinking dots of lights…. pity….