If you’ve been walking through Prospect Park or pausing under the trees in Fort Greene lately and thought the city was suddenly feeling… enchanted, you’re not alone. New Yorkers across all five boroughs are reporting a serious uptick in the number of fireflies (a.k.a. lightning bugs) lighting up our humid summer nights and, yes, it’s very real.
The dazzling comeback is courtesy of an unusually rainy spring. According to entomologists, the near-constant showers created ideal soggy conditions for firefly larvae, who thrive in moist soil rich with snails, slugs and other tasty morsels. “They do really well when there’s a lot of rainfall,” Dr. Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, told the New York Post. “That extra moisture, that is really good for the juvenile [fireflies]—the juveniles develop into adults, and those are the adults that are moving around and flashing.”
And New York had plenty of rain to go around—May alone saw precipitation on 18 days. That’s helped fuel a flashier-than-usual firefly season, even if, technically, firefly populations are still on the decline overall. “It’s not necessarily that we’re seeing more,” Ware clarified to the paper. “It’s that we’re not seeing as few.”…