“We go through this internal prioritization process and ask ‘Which one should we address first?’” “It’s like triage in the ER,” Winton says of the process to label a species as threatened.

Seeing something glowing on the landscape that is not man-made is not common, so going back hundreds of years there’s references to fireflies.” He estimates there are about a half-dozen firefly researchers in Texas, two of whom will join him this August in West Texas’s Davis Mountains for a pulse check on one of two species in the state that were categorized as threatened in the Xerces Society’s census. The organizations found that 14 percent of all species studied were categorized as threatened, and warned that the number could be misleading and the reality much more dire due to data deficits. As painfully adorable as it sounds, the census yielded some discouraging results. In 2021, the Xerces Society, a nonprofit that works to preserve invertebrate species, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List teamed up to take a sort of firefly census. That’s true for the majority of fireflies in the United States.” Read Next: The Flight of the Texas Fireflies “Most invertebrates end up in a category that we call ‘data deficient,’ where there’s just not enough data for us to know what’s happening with their population. But across all the species, we really don’t have a grasp to what degree,” Winton says. If it sounds like there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to where Texas’s firefly population stands across the board, you’re doing a great job of reading this story. He says this sort of discovery is a fairly regular occurrence with invertebrates, of which there are upward of 80,000 known species just in Texas. People think you have to go to the upper Amazon or Southeast Asia to find new species, but you can find them in your own backyard,” Winton says. “When you look at the map of where fireflies appear, there are so many holes and so many unique habitats within those holes. Ross Winton, an invertebrate biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department who serves as the organization’s point person for anything without a backbone “except for mussels and crawfish,” doesn’t think it sounds all that unlikely that you yourself could stumble upon a previously unknown variant in your own yard. Although we might think of and speak about fireflies as though they’re one large conglomerate, there are more than forty different species in Texas alone-and those are just the ones we know about. But some Texans have noticed that this June has seemed dimmer. The soothing sight of the little critters, bobbing and glowing through tall grass, often feels as reliable as the changing of the seasons. The light-emitting beetles have been known to captivate Texans as early as April and, depending on weather and rainfall, as late as October. The stars that fly among us.įireflies, I mean, or (if you’re wrong) lightning bugs. Sunsets so late you feel like you’ve gotten away with something.

There are all kinds of really delightful indicators that a bright, hot Texas summer has arrived: Patio burgers and first swims.

Are lightning bugs extinct