“Be honest with me: Now you want to study fireflies too, right?” said Luiz Felipe Silveira, a professor at Western Carolina University and one of the world’s leading experts in — of course — fireflies. At that point in our online conversation, Silveira was enthusiastically showing me the results of a study he published with seven other Brazilian scientists in 2022. The article, published in Zoologica Scripta, focused on the evolution of a single genus of firefly (Luciuranus), but it spoke volumes about the diversity of the entire group in the Atlantic Forest. “Of all eight species we studied here,” Silveira explained, “none co-occur at a fine scale. That is, they can inhabit the same mountain, for example, but they are never really occupying the same spaces at the same time.” Each firefly lives in its own little niche, a specific set of preferred climatic conditions, such as temperature and humidity. Many species have wingless females, a trait that restricts their mobility and further ties them to their particular environment. They are, as ecologists put it, habitat specialists. Not every firefly fits this lifestyle, but many in South America do. Scientists have catalogued around 350 fireflies in Brazil alone, a number Silveira guaranteed was a drastic underestimation. Fireflies lighting up the night at Serra dos Órgãos National Park, Teresópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Image courtesy of André Alves. “Brazil has an incredible diversity of habitats. It is very likely that many endemic species are just waiting to be discovered,” he said.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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