First Emergence of a Firefly from Colorado Under Human Care
June 29, 2023 · Uncategorized
An exciting event just occurred at Butterfly Pavilion! Three firefly larvae from our collection in 2021 pupated into adult fireflies!
To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to have successfully bred and reared this Coloradan species of firefly to adulthood. This is a critical first step in long-term conservation efforts to help protect and support our native species of fireflies in the Front Range and beyond. Butterfly Pavilion researchers have been working towards understanding the lifecycle of fireflies in Colorado since 2017. Very little is known about the lifecycle and needs of our local fireflies. Many people don’t even know we have fireflies in Colorado! But they do exist in small, little-known populations throughout the state.
To study the firefly lifecycle, researchers from Butterfly Pavilion travel to Fort Collins one night a year to collect wild adult fireflies under a research permit. The adult fireflies are taken back to Butterfly Pavilion to breed and lay eggs. These eggs transform into larvae and are cared for in our lab. We have spent four years regularly feeding, misting, and making small changes to their enclosures to try to trigger the larvae to pupate. The two females and one male which emerged last week have been in our care since they were eggs laid in our lab in 2021, meaning that we now know that it can take two years for both male and female fireflies of this species to go from eggs to fully formed adults! To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to have successfully bred and reared this Coloradan species of firefly to adulthood. This is a critical first step in long-term conservation efforts to help protect and support our native species of fireflies in the Front Range and beyond. Besides providing fascinating summer lightshows for humans, fireflies are an indicator species for wetland habitats. Their health and survivability indicate the overall health of an ecosystem Rearing a species to adulthood allows us to fully understand their life history to better support conservation efforts driven by scientific data. Studying their needs in a lab setting allows us to better concentrate conservation efforts on their needs for food, shelter, and overall habitat. Colorado species of fireflies are currently very poorly understood. This greatly expands our understanding of these species and will help with future efforts to describe species, improve habitat, and protect their magical experience for future Coloradans. This knowledge enables us to rear animals for release and “head start” fireflies (in other words, raise them past their most vulnerable early life stages to increase survivorship). Indeed, we hope to re-establish populations of fireflies in Colorado in the future The next step is to have more of our fireflies emerge as adults and to ultimately breed them to create a sustainable population of lab reared fireflies. We would like to fully describe this species of firefly and continue collecting additional species of fireflies to expand Colorado’s knowledge of the species in our care. We will also share our knowledge of firefly husbandry techniques with other facilities across the United States to further the study and conservation of these unique beetles.
