SUMMER OF LOVE IN WASHINGTON, DC!
Submitted by Tommer on July 11, 2009
This is firefly season in Washington, the best and brightest in several years. Scientists say a wet spring has made a lightning-bug-friendly region even more so, and hordes of the insects are now spending the last days of their lives floating over lawns and blinking in treetops.
This spectacle holds even more magic if you know what they’re saying.
“Then the whole world of fireflies opens up to you,” said Sara M. Lewis, a professor who studies the family Lampyridae (“shining ones”) at Tufts University outside Boston. There is seduction and rejection, codes and code-breaking, mating and eating alive. “You can watch the dialogue,” she said,