People, Plants, and Pollinators edition - July 2026 - 09/21/2024 Rebroadcast

In 2020, Anna Walker, a species survival officer at the New Mexico Biopark Society, kept stumbling across old museum records of fireflies from New Mexico mountain ranges. She assumed the specimens were mislabeled. But when she went to look, she found fireflies still there. That discovery opened a door into a world most people don’t know exists: the Southwest has its own fireflies, and they behave very differently from the flashing swarms of the eastern United States.

What a firefly actually is

Fireflies are not flies or bugs. They are beetles in the family Lampyridae, and there are about 2,200 species worldwide. The United States has roughly 170 species across 21 genera. In the Southwest, there are about 33 species; New Mexico alone hosts 13. These break into three distinct groups. The first is the familiar flashing firefly: males fly and emit species-specific courtship signals; females on the ground flash back, and the male descends to mate. The second is the glow worm: the female retains larval features, cannot fly, and lives in burrows (abandoned rodent holes or ant nests). At night she points a lantern skyward and glows continuously. Males have enormous eyes to spot her. The third group is diurnal dark fireflies: they are active during the day, produce no light as adults, and find mates using pheromones. As larvae, however, all fireflies glow. That glow is