Where Have the Fireflies Gone?

I went out last night to buy some fruits and other foodstuffs, it was quite dark and I was with my phone torch light. I turn off the light for a while and I noticed something, I guess I never gave so much attention to it till yesterday.

I noticed the were no fireflies around, I turned the torch light on again and I started wondering, where are all the fireflies? Where I live is not so much of a city that I would have assumed that it is because of the lights everywhere that is making them not quite visible. There were actually bushes around and I didn’t see any one.

I was actually surprised, a lot of things have greatly changed, now we can barely see butterflies and other natural creatures. I kept asking myself “have these fireflies really gone extinct? I can still remember a lot back when I was still a kid, there were lots of them around, they would shine their yellow light and light up the dark. We played with them a whole lot of times, there were wonderful and harmless creatures.

Those days, whenever we play moonlight plays with our friends, neighbors and siblings it was always really fun especially when we play hide and seek, the fireflies would always show us the path to follow because they glow at night.

source In my childhood days, they would always tell us bad and scary stories about the fireflies but that never stopped us from catching them into jars and playing with them. If at my age now I barely find any fireflies I really doubt if my children would be able to see these creatures when they are born and grown.

A lot has been happening recently, our environment is no longer a safe place for creatures to keep surviving, I love nature a lot but I keep wondering how I can make others equally appreciate the beauty of nature. Because it is in appreciating the beauty of nature that we would be very conscious of not destroying them either intentionally or unintentionally.

I said so because, most of us love and appreciate nature but our ignorance has made us destroy them through our actions unintentionally.

Our environment have changed drastically, I also believe that urbanization and deforestation have contributed to the scarcity of fireflies not just that, our daily human activities too.

I read somewhere that the light the fireflies produce helps them to mate and so reproduce more but when there is bright light everywhere, their lights can ‘t even be seen and as a result mating would not really happen.

I don’t really know why this really hit me but I feel we should try and interact well with our environment, the more we keep destroying nature the more beauty we lose. Fireflies, though they are so tiny also have great roles to play with the web of life. Let’s be very intentional about preserving these harmless creatures so that our children might get to know and see them physically and not just as pictures in books.