What is the Message of Firefly Synchronisity?

July 11th, 2010

Unless you have lived in a concrete jungle your entire life where you have never even seen the countryside, you have been amazed by the phenomenon known as the Firefly at some point in your life. Blinking green lights in the night have entertained kids for ages. It was always a curious sight and we always wanted to know what they were all about. Even trapping them in jars to try and see if we could create our very own light source. That is those that realized bugs needed oxygen too . The more murderous type really were amazed when they realized that the insides of them still glowed in the dark when they were dead!

So what is all that blinking about? There have never really been studies on whether this blinking served a real function. The first experiments on the function of this phenomenon suggest that synchronous flashing preserves female fireflies’ recognition of suitable mates. The results are reported in the July 9 issue of Science (This is the scientificy jargon read).

“There have been lots of really good observations and hypotheses about firefly synchrony,” says lead author Andrew Moiseff of the University of Connecticut. “But until now, no one has experimentally tested whether synchrony has a function.”

Fireflies are actually a type of beetle. They produce bioluminescence as a mating tool, in which males display a species-specific pattern of flashes while “cruising” through the air, looking for females, says Moiseff. These patterns consist of one or more flashes followed by a characteristic pause, during which female fireflies, perched on leaves or branches, will produce a single response flash if they spot a suitable male. Kind of like trying sell merchant account to a prospective buyer .

“We had the technology to design something that we thought would create a virtual world for these females,” says Moiseff.

Their results showed that females responded more than 80 percent of the time to flashes that were in perfect unison or in near-perfect unison. But when the flashes were out of synch, the females’ response rate was 10 percent or less.