In grad school, he’d studied and documented the rhythmic lunge and strike patterns of praying mantises. Ever since, music dominated his approach to the natural world. Still, he indulged Faust, asking her to describe what she’d witnessed by drawing a “musical score.” As a child, Copeland, a tuba player, dreamed of playing with the Boston Symphony. “The dogma said they do not synchronize in North America,” he says. Reports of synchrony had crossed his desk before but had never panned out. He connected her with Jonathan Copeland, a biologist and professor at Georgia Southern University who was studying firefly behavior in Malaysia and Indonesia. More than 20 years ago, Faust wrote a letter to Strogatz after reading his article. There are roughly 2,000 species worldwide and 125 or more in North America alone, where catching them is a childhood rite of passage. But for creatures so striking, they’re also common. The bugs flash for lots of reasons: to communicate, to attract mates, to scare off predators. Their glow comes from an internal chemical reaction that combines oxygen and calcium with a series of enzymes, including a key light-producing one called luciferin. Technically, they are bioluminescent beetles. But how could she prove it?įireflies-or lightning bugs-may be the closest thing nature has to a magic trick: lighting the world from the inside out. Faust knew the truth: that her Tennessse fireflies were every bit as special as the species in Asia. As she dug deeper, Faust found that while there had been more than 100 years of colloquial accounts of North American fireflies flashing in sync, scientists discounted those reports, attributing them to lore or optical illusion. It contradicted the light shows she had seen growing up. Highlighting how rare this phenomenon was, Strogatz noted that there were no synchronous fireflies in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, her academic interest began only in the ’90s, when she read an article by Steven Strogatz, a Cornell mathematician, in which he marveled at a species of Southeast Asian firefly that synchronized its flashes. But she wasn’t always obsessed with the insect. Today, at 60, she’s a naturalist who writes scientific papers and field guides about fireflies. In her twenties, she circumnavigated the globe for three years, visiting islands you could only get to by boat, learning about cultures before they disappeared, pursuing underwater photography. In college, she majored in forensic anthropology and minored in forestry. The natural world has long enchanted Faust. “I’d assumed there was only one kind of firefly and thought they did a nice show in the Smokies,” she says. They’d sit, mesmerized by the “drumbeat with no sound.” And though they’d appreciated the show for generations, Faust never thought the event was newsworthy. It continues this way for hours.Īs a child, Lynn Faust would huddle with her family on the cabin porch to watch the spectacle. It’s as if the trees were strung up with Christmas lights: bright for three seconds, dark for six, and then bright again, over and over. Instead of scattershot blips of light in the summer sky, the fireflies-thousands of them-pulse this way for hours, together in eerie, quiet harmony. It’s June, and for two weeks in Elkmont, Tennessee, the fireflies pool their efforts. Twenty years ago, science didn’t believe they existed.Īt exactly 9:27 P.M., when dusk slips into darkness in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the “light show” begins. Today, the rare Smoky Mountain fireflies are a tourist attraction.
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