SALEM, Ohio — For one weekend every year, the Pennsylvania state insect lights up the night sky while dozens of lucky individuals get the honor of watching.
These lucky onlookers are viewing the magic glow of fireflies in the Allegheny National Forest during the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival. The festival, hosted by Peggy and Ken Butler, has brought thousands of people to their property in Tionesta.
But soon, Tionesta will host another group of firefly enthusiasts: a team of entomologists who are hoping to protect lightening bugs through the state’s first-ever firefly inventory.
“We don’t have enough information to know for sure if they’re declining, because we don’t have excellent surveys from 50 years ago,” said John Wenzel, entomologist and executive director of the Conemaugh Valley Conservancy, who will lead the inventory.
“But in some cases, I think it’s pretty clear that we’ve damaged the environment so much that you can’t find them until you go into the Allegheny National Forest or a nature reserve, and you find a whole lot of them.”
Wenzel, along with Andy Deans, professor and director of the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State University, and Marc Branham, professor in the Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of Florida, are able to conduct this project thanks to a $31,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
The goal is to measure how many firefly species are present in the state and where they are located to help inform policies to better protect them.
Firefly inventory
So far, the team of entomologists estimates there are roughly 30 to 33 different species. According to Deans, the inventory will help “fill in the gaps” of where fireflies are located across the state.
But, in order to find and identify new species, Wenzel, Deans and Branham will have to look at the species already known in the state.
They’ll do this by combing through the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State University and the natural history collections of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
“That’ll give us sort of a series through time of what we understand about which species occur, where and when,” said Deans.
Next, the team will take what they know out into the field in the summer when fireflies are at their peak population. The entomologists will select specific sites, like the Allegheny National Forest, which is known for lightening bugs, and use several techniques to find and identify them.
By starting at places already known to have these insects, it will help the team identify other possible locations based on similar climate conditions, said Wenzel.
According to him, the easiest way to identify the species of a firefly is by using a fly intercept trap. The insect will fly into this plastic trap and fall into a trough filled with a soapy preservative. This will trap and kill the fireflies, but Deans emphasizes they won’t be collecting thousands, only a handful necessary for identification.
Other methods include recording fly patterns — male fireflies fly specific patterns to court females. However, that will only give entomologists a “ballpark” figure for the species.
“To know for sure, you need to dissect genitalia, which you can’t do in a living specimen,” Deans said.
According to Deans, the grant funding was set aside to better understand lightening bugs, especially given their popularity in Pennsylvania.
“Fireflies are one of those groups of insects that has been highlighted as declining. They’re also very popular and charismatic, and in Pennsylvania, there are multiple firefly festivals, and so (DCNR) recognizes that this organism brings money into some local economies in Pennsylvania.”
Pa. Firefly Festival
Peggy and Ken Butler began hosting the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival in Forest County in 2013 after scientists who were studying fireflies in the area came to stay at the Butlers’ bed and breakfast.
During this trip, scientist Lynn Frierson Faust found that the synchronous firefly existed in the county; this species of fireflies is unique as they flash their lights in sync.
Faust also helped identify this same species in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, which also hosts a firefly festival.
This new information kicked off the Butlers’ quest to learn about lightening bugs, and soon they would host tours and nighttime stays on their property — located near the Allegheny National Forest — of about 100 people. But quickly, the festival started to grow, and not for the better.
In 2016, 1,000 people showed up in one night, said Peggy, which “ruined it.”
“We eventually realized we were going to harm the very thing that the people wanted to come see if we allowed too many people to come,” she said.
This quick growth in popularity can be attributed to a 2015 documentary called “David Attenborough’s Light on Earth” that featured the festival. The documentary was narrated by Sir. David Attenborough, who, according to Peggy, had never seen fireflies.
“When that film was released in 2016, that’s when everybody kind of went crazy and started coming from all over the world,” Peggy said, adding they have had visitors from every continent except Antarctica.
Now, the Butlers have a lottery system that selects 75 people for two nighttime tours at the Tionesta Lake Visitor Center. The lottery is a Google form that individuals fill out; this year, the deadline to enter is the last Saturday of March.
Previously, the couple has hosted the festival on their property, but this year the festival will take place in downtown Tionesta on June 27 from noon to 6 p.m. and is open to the public. The tours will take place on June 26 and 27.
While Peggy hasn’t seen a decline in firefly populations, she supports the inventory the team of entomologists is working on as “the majority of the known firefly species are under-reported.”
Deans and Wenzel will likely conduct part of this inventory in the Allegheny National Forest, where the Butlers are located, as it’s firefly-heavy.
Meanwhile, they hope this love of fireflies in Pennsylvania will encourage more people to care and advocate for insects in general.
“Little kids like bugs and everything, and then as you grow up, you tend to change your interests. But I think we’re all born as naturalists. We’re all born as biologists. Think of how many kids love to visit a farm, that’s because of all those animals, right?” Wenzel said.
“Everybody has a natural interest, and as we grow and develop, we kind of lose it a bit. But some things still stand out. Everybody likes butterflies, everybody likes fireflies, right?”
(Liz Partsch can be reached at epartsch@farmanddairy.com or 330-337-3419.)
