The Disappearance of the Fireflies

I have spent a fair amount of time away from home–long, vivid months in Taiwan studying Chinese, summers researching green spaces in Tokyo. This past year was perhaps my longest stretch. I flew 4000 miles away from New York to work for a tribal consortium in Alaska. The immense love I developed for its warm communities and subzero temperatures is a story for another time.

When I came home in late July, I went for a long evening walk through my Long Island neighborhood. After a year in Alaska, the suburbs seemed almost unnaturally manicured with their trimmed lawns, ornamental hydrangeas, and sprinklers slowly completing their rotations. It could not be more different than the no-nonsense streets of Fairbanks or the rugged boreal forest. Here, everything was meticulously designed by the human hand. As the minutes passed, something else began to bother me. There were no fireflies.

In the last weeks before going home, I had read A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, a science-fiction novella in which a tea monk leaves their life to search for the sound of a cricket. In the book’s imagined future, humans have voluntarily returned half the planet to wilderness, and crickets have disappeared from the places where people live. That night, as I wandered around my childhood town, I thought that these fictional visions crept closer and closer to reality with each passing year.

Upon reading that book, I had already begun worrying that perhaps, in the dense suburbs of Long Island, I would not hear a cricket. It had been so long that I’d forgotten the last time I heard that chirp at home. I feared I would not see any wild creatures at all. The butterflies had already disappeared, after all.

As a child, I regularly watched monarch butterflies pass through our backyard during their migration north. My elementary school classes raised them from caterpillars. The day we released them was a school-wide spectacle. I had a children’s book explaining their life cycle: how monarch caterpillars feed on milkweed, how that diet helps protect them from predators, and how the butterflies navigate hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain. Nowadays, I occasionally see a cabbage butterfly–and that is all.

The disappearance of insects is not simply something I imagine. Scientists have documented substantial declines in insect abundance and biomass across many ecosystems, although the extent and causes vary considerably. A 2025 review led by researchers at Binghamton University examined more than 175 scientific reviews and identified more than 500 proposed drivers of insect decline. Agricultural intensification was the most frequently cited, but the researchers emphasized that insect declines emerge from interconnected pressures including land-use change, pesticides, climate, and urbanization.

Monarchs are one of the insects we notice. They are beautiful, familiar, and charismatic enough to inspire school projects and children’s books. Their decline has been extensively studied. The number of monarchs overwintering in Mexico has fallen by as much as 80% from historical levels, with habitat loss, pesticides, climate change, and other pressures contributing to their decline.

What about the fireflies? They are charismatic as well, but less studied. Fireflies are not actually flies, but belong to beetle species in the family Lampyridae. The flashing displays that characterize our long summer nights are a courtship ritual: males signal from the air, while females respond from the ground. Surprisingly, this magnificent marvel of nature and biology is only a small part of their lives. Fireflies spend most of their lives as larvae, feeding on soft-bodied creatures such as snails, slugs, worms, and other insect larvae. In doing so, they help keep the ecosystem functioning by controlling pest populations.

A 2020 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Firefly Specialist Group assessment marked 18 species as “threatened” and a shocking 53% as “data deficient. There was simply not enough research to definitively classify their conservation status. One reason for this data deficiency stems from the difficulty of catching and discerning different species, each of which has its own unique language written in light. But the species of Lampyridae that emit light are actually the easiest to research. Fireflies are easy to miss even when they are everywhere. Whether as beetles or larvae, for most of their lives they exist hidden among leaves and soil.

Fireflies are vulnerable to changes that make a landscape look more orderly to us. Artificial light can interfere with the visual signals fireflies use to find one another. Removing leaf litter and excessively manicuring lawns can destroy the damp, sheltered habitat where their larvae develop. So it made sense that the impeccably engineered suburbs I came home to this summer were emptier of those distinctive flashes in the night.

Still, firefly decline is relatively well-known. When I google “firefly population decline,” I get 560,000 results on Google. I think about what other insect species have quietly gone extinct. How could I bear learning about them from a library book or online article, just to realize they no longer exist in the real world? I built my wonder for the living world because I was able to look outside and witness its beauty. But I am worried about what might happen to a future generation who does not know to expect this bounty, let alone feel gratitude for it. When we do not know to look for those flashes of light at dusk, we cannot spread that joy and knowledge. The presence of nature in our writing has already declined by 60% between 1800 and 2019, and I am afraid to think about how the presence of nature in our minds has followed.

But for now, there is still much for me to do. I hold hope in my steadfast love for protecting our environment. As I turn the corner, I see a flash of light twinkle in the night.

Rachel Carson National Environmental Leadership Fellow Victoria Lu

Victoria is a Master of Environmental Management Candidate at the Yale School of Environment. She graduated Yale College in 2025 with a double major in Art and Environmental Studies and spent her gap year working as an Alaska Fellow with Tanana Chiefs Conference. In her fellowship, she works on building climate resilience for Alaska Native communities through mitigation planning and mapping. She has also recently interned with the Earth Law Center conducting rights of rivers research and volunteered with Alaska Marine Community Coalition on stronger pelagic trawl gear regulations.