They once lit up summer nights, people read by their luminescence and they've been celebrated by everyone from William Shakespeare to Crowfoot, a 19th-century North American chief.
But glowworms have had their lights dimmed by a cult of tidiness in the countryside, the loss of wild meadows and light pollution.
Now, hundreds of glowworms (Lampyris noctiluca) are being bred in captivity for release in two locations this summer, in an attempt to revive the declining species.
[...] The larvae – a gardener's friend, being voracious predators of snails – take two years to mature, which leaves them susceptible to being destroyed by increasingly intense meadow management, with regular cuts for silage and hay.
[...] "If we get really good at captive breeding and release, schoolchildren can turn these things out into the countryside. Why couldn't this be something you do as a child that has real meaning? They will look at these tiny things they've allowed to twinkle again and say 'we did that'. People need to have these formative experiences if they are to care for the things with whom we share the planet."
When I was in primary school, we would get a tree sapling to plant every Arbor Day, which was intended to raise our awareness more so than to restore the forests. A challenge for these citizen-led restoration projects is being able to do it at a large enough scale to have an impact, which requires a lot of high level organization (and $$).
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday May 24 2022, @09:48AM (4 children)
Congratulations to scientists for successful breeding. That may help in near future to bring some light to cities in windless nights...
Anyway, is the Lampyris beetle edible?
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday May 24 2022, @10:51AM (2 children)
Bloody difficult too, we had to publish dozens of research papers with lots of diagrams, and even then very few of them managed it, mostly because they were too busy peering through microscopes or were never even aware that the other person was interested in them despite lots of hints.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @01:17PM
I know it's a joke (funny one), but it does not pay to be subtle when pursuing someone or wanting that person to pursue you.
(Score: 2, Touché) by liar on Tuesday May 24 2022, @04:45PM
https://xkcd.com/333/ [xkcd.com]
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @05:21PM
i suppose everything is edible ... some guy aet a 747 over years .. using a file?
however, if your REAL edibles are being eaten by snails and that is not the intent, maybe them fireflies can help?
i hear "somehow" a brazilien snail was imported to south east asia and is eating all the rice plants now.
i wonder if planning a high-density living community for fireflies right next to the rice paddies might save on some pesticide and stuff?
too bad fireflies don't really enjoy the easy way of getting rid of fallen leafs and and rice stalk stubbles ("weeeh! Fire-no-more-flies. no more snails") and general air-pollution :(
then again, they have different philosophies down there: "rent gives money, money buys everything, including snail pesticide" (i guess that's why i put that previous "somehow" in parentheses)?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday May 24 2022, @01:22PM (4 children)
If you don't address the problem of why a species is dying out, then adding new members via a captive breeding program doesn't solve the problem. And I didn't see anything in the summary about addressing "increasingly intense meadow management, with regular cuts for silage and hay".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Tuesday May 24 2022, @02:19PM (1 child)
They are transplanting them to the countryside away from human-infested area which is something. Realistically if humans keep encroaching on their habitat it would be for naught, but the environment far away from major human settlements should be more habitable to them than areas which regularly get blanketed with pesticide or harvested for animal feed by industrial machinery.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday May 24 2022, @03:42PM
If the species can live there, it's probably already there at the highest sustainable volume for the current environment. It's not like this is an introduced species. What's needed is the alter the environment so it doesn't kill them off faster than they can reproduce. This sounds like, at best, a stop-gap. California condor were dying off until lead shot and DDT were banned. Now the species is slowly gaining. The captive breeding program was NECESSARY because the wild population was really small. (25 IIRC, but it's been a long time since I paid attention.) With glow worms that's really unlikely to be the case.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 24 2022, @05:46PM (1 child)
FTA
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday May 25 2022, @12:14AM
The adult stage is winged, so I presume that the restoration of the meadows is the important part.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by liar on Tuesday May 24 2022, @03:17PM (5 children)
Seven Worlds One Planet :North America contained a nice segment on Fireflies, nice visuals.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10340178/ [imdb.com]
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 1) by liar on Tuesday May 24 2022, @05:06PM (4 children)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7yig8d [dailymotion.com] from 16:28
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday May 25 2022, @12:08AM (3 children)
Kinda off topic...
Glow worms. Fire flys. Electric eels. Gene Editing.
Gene Transcoding. "Gain of function"....
Why do we not yet have " power plants " that can provide usable electricity?
Why do we not have plants that glow in the dark and provide usable illumination?
Instead, we fund "gain of function" on terrible diseases!!!
What the hell is going on here???
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @01:19AM (1 child)
China is all hot to conduct gain of function research (and Fauci, the megalomaniac troll, was eager to fund it, probably for ego reasons) because it is bioweapons (or germ warfare, to use the old term) research. There is plausible deniability created by claiming it's really to prepare for a mutant disease outbreak, should it occur, and by occur, I mean be directly created by your research.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @05:10AM
Sounds all scary when you don't know what those words actually mean. Enlighten yourself [phys.org] and stop being afraid of everything. It's better for your state of mind. If you get too stressed, you might end up trying to overthrow democracies because you think some big strong man will keep all the boogeymen away from you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @04:04PM
because "profit".
imagine a alternative universe, where information can be purged by authoraties.
so in this alternative universe, 1-week-pre-electricity, all rural towns were "bright" 'cause there where as many fireflies and cockroaches.
this is free.
electricity is discovered. the problem of a "dark night" needs to be created. so electricity didn't really find any investors until a way to kill the abundant fireflies cheap and reliably was found ... the existence of "abundant, non-dark nights" information is then purged from records.