The Mystery of Synchronous Fireflies - Smarter Every Day 274

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Ambiance, audio and musicy things by: Gordon McGladdery

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Destin

[smartereveryday]

This is an incredible sight to witness in person. If lightning bugs are in your area, most come out from May - July depending on your area.
A HUGE Thank you to those of you who support on Patreon! You helped rent these cameras!

[thethoughtemporium]

You asked about the chemistry. There's a video I've been working on for like 6 months you're gonna love when it comes out eventually. What you'll find amazing is that we understand the chemistry so well and how easy it is to recreate in other organisms. So you can take the glow genes from say a firefly and express them in bacteria and make glowing bacteria soup. Or grow the two parts separately and combine them when you want, to make a sudden glow on demand. There's a few companies doing this for various reasons. One I'm particularly excited about is light-bio that took the glow genes from fungi and expressed them in plants and have made a suite of bioluminescent green plants.
Amazing video as always.
Also this reminded me of a computer game I played as a kid. One of the magic school bus games included a bit about how fireflies communicate and how different pulse patterns were used for different things. Hadn't thought about that game in probably 20 years.

[besmart]

No one ever talks about how many mosquitoes you have to put up with to get long-exposure firefly photos 😂 I lost like half a pint last time I went out to do this

[kadgx]

As a long time digital photographer, I'm well aware of the difficulties of low light photography. I think you did a great job working around the limitations of your equipment. I really like the stills with all the fireflies in the woods. So very pretty. Thanks so much for sharing. I'm glad to see you and the family having fun together, as an amazing bonus.

[terramater]

Hey Destin. In fact, it is possible to capture the magical firefly show on camera and get a beautiful non-blurry result with a little trick: letting the light come in through one lens yet then split it in two for separate sensors. One for infrared and the other one blue & green light. We developed a system for this with an incredible result a couple of years back and even made a video about it, which we can't link here but can find it on our channel.

[heatherleigh]

Bioluminescence is extremely difficult to photograph- whether it is the algae in the water or the fireflies. Either way I loved this and Robins photos were amazing.

[cybersteel]

There's something so wholesome and kind watching these personal videos of Destin, going out with his family to just admire beauty. I feel like I'm with you there, watching you struggle with the cameras, in audible awe of how beautiful the fireflies look. This structure of video is enthralling. Keep it up Destin!

[SG_]

The fact that this man spend an entire year making a video to teach us about these fireflies is absolutely incredible and I cannot thank you enough for the amount of beauty and joy this brings to the internet. I absolutely love videos like this and the passion you have makes it so much more enjoyable on top of how much it already is

[zerbie]

You're a national treasure, Destin. You're content is beyond amazing.

[foompthedroid]

Hey Destin, when I lived in Missouri, I used to "talk" to the fireflies. I would take a very low lumen flashlight, cup it so only a sliver of light came through and would flash patterns to the fireflies out in the yard and they would respond. Their pattern was simple and slow enough I could easily duplicate it with a simple tailswitch flashlight (Streamlight Microstream). When I moved back to North Dakota, I attempted the same but their pattern was too fast to duplicate. I always joked about doing a LED driver via a lighting console and see if I could teach them a pattern. "Dot Dot Dot Dash Dash Dash Dot Dot Dot". I thought it would be hilarious to have the fireflies signaling SOS in Morse Code.

[BrilliantDesignOnline]

The synchrony is like the mystery of music; how humans perceive notes and their arrangement, and extract a 'beat' and the musicians and listeners synch up. Growing up in the West, we had never seen fireflies, but we drove to Minnesota to visit a friend who said, "Oh yeah, come outside" and we were simply blown away. The kids caught some and gave them to us to observe up close; definitely ranks up with some of the coolest things I have done in life: fireflies. Comparing my real life experience to your attempt to capture the reality, which was not bad, but let me say, it just cannot compare to seeing it live.

[mvadu]

"I tried to never grow up!!" those were the magical words Destin. Kudos to Robin for finding that magical place.. Even though you weren't able to capture it in the video we could feel the magic in your excitement.

[Nighthawkinlight]

I'm not proud that this was my first thought... How do these look when they hit a windshield? The fireflies around here leave a bright splash that slowly fade after 5-10 seconds. Seems like in order to ramp up and burn out so quickly these guys must use a higher concentration of the light producing chemicals.

I know I've seen fireflies behave this way more than once but didn't realize there were more than the one species.

[Andyroo]

Hey Destin this is such an amazing video, brings me back. Is there any chance we could get the full resolution images. (They would look amazing as wallpapers)

[curtislindsey]

I was lucky enough to see this in our front yard growing up. I thought everyone had the fireflies during the late spring. It's incredible if you ever get the chance to see them!

[NSSC]

Crazy when I open up YouTube and I see a smarter every day video posted 19 seconds ago

I got a whole backyard of synchronized lightning bugs. I figured out how to trigger them with a few LEDs in the field. Lightning bugs are so cool.

Edit: I wrote this comment before watching the part where you used LEDs too! GMTA!

[UncleManuel]

"childlike joy and wonder" - Destin, this is why we love to watch this channel. You have a good hand at educating, entertaining and inspiring your audience... 😎👍

[hondolane]

I had no idea there were so many different blinking patterns. As to the "how" they sync up, I can only think of the phenomenon where multiple people walking together will unintentionally synchronize their steps.

[vellcet]

This happens in my back yard occasionally. It blew my mind the first time I saw it--as I was totally unaware of the phenomena. Nature is beautiful and full of wonder.

[BassGrve]

Man, this was absolutely magical. Thank you Destin for having the most magically entertaining and intelectually curious channel on this website.