The Mystery of Synchronous Fireflies - Smarter Every Day 274

The email list is here: www.smartereveryday.com/email-list This is an incredible sight to witness in person. If lightning bugs are in your area, most come out from May - July depending on your area. A HUGE Thank you to those of you who support on Patreon! You helped rent these cameras!

No one ever talks about how many mosquitoes you have to put up with to get long-exposure firefly photos 😂 I lost like half a pint last time I went out to do this

You asked about the chemistry. There's a video I've been working on for like 6 months you're gonna love when it comes out eventually. What you'll find amazing is that we understand the chemistry so well and how easy it is to recreate in other organisms. So you can take the glow genes from say a firefly and express them in bacteria and make glowing bacteria soup. Or grow the two parts separately and combine them when you want, to make a sudden glow on demand. There's a few companies doing this for various reasons. One I'm particularly excited about is light-bio that took the glow genes from fungi and expressed them in plants and have made a suite of bioluminescent green plants. Amazing video as always. Also this reminded me of a computer game I played as a kid. One of the magic school bus games included a bit about how fireflies communicate and how different pulse patterns were used for different things. Hadn't thought about that game in probably 20 years.

This is so magical

Hey Destin. In fact, it is possible to capture the magical firefly show on camera and get a beautiful non-blurry result with a little trick: letting the light come in through one lens yet then split it in two for separate sensors. One for infrared and the other one blue & green light. We developed a system for this with an incredible result a couple of years back and even made a video about it, which we can't link here but can find it on our channel.

I'm not proud that this was my first thought... How do these look when they hit a windshield? The fireflies around here leave a bright splash that slowly fade after 5-10 seconds. Seems like in order to ramp up and burn out so quickly these guys must use a higher concentration of the light producing chemicals. I know I've seen fireflies behave this way more than once but didn't realize there were more than the one species.

here I am having dinner at 3AM watching this with an assignment due Wednesday

Hey Destin, when I lived in Missouri, I used to "talk" to the fireflies. I would take a very low lumen flashlight, cup it so only a sliver of light came through and would flash patterns to the fireflies out in the yard and they would respond. Their pattern was simple and slow enough I could easily duplicate it with a simple tailswitch flashlight (Streamlight Microstream). When I moved back to North Dakota, I attempted the same but their pattern was too fast to duplicate. I always joked about doing a LED driver via a lighting console and see if I could teach them a pattern. "Dot Dot Dot Dash Dash Dash Dot Dot Dot". I thought it would be hilarious to have the fireflies signaling SOS in Morse Code.

10:05 lol

Bioluminescence is extremely difficult to photograph- whether it is the algae in the water or the fireflies. Either way I loved this and Robins photos were amazing.

You're a national treasure, Destin. You're content is beyond amazing.

There's something so wholesome and kind watching these personal videos of Destin, going out with his family to just admire beauty. I feel like I'm with you there, watching you struggle with the cameras, in audible awe of how beautiful the fireflies look. This structure of video is enthralling. Keep it up Destin!

As a long time digital photographer, I'm well aware of the difficulties of low light photography. I think you did a great job working around the limitations of your equipment. I really like the stills with all the fireflies in the woods. So very pretty. Thanks so much for sharing. I'm glad to see you and the family having fun together, as an amazing bonus.

The fact that this man spend an entire year making a video to teach us about these fireflies is absolutely incredible and I cannot thank you enough for the amount of beauty and joy this brings to the internet. I absolutely love videos like this and the passion you have makes it so much more enjoyable on top of how much it already is

9:05 😂 he did some magi

What's the guitar music called at 13:00

"I tried to never grow up!!" those were the magical words Destin. Kudos to Robin for finding that magical place.. Even though you weren't able to capture it in the video we could feel the magic in your excitement.

I feel like bioluminescence doesn't pick up on camera like it does in person. The only way to really experience this amazing part of nature is experiencing it in person. Awesome video.

I love how you just put in all this effort to make people stop and have them realise what a wonderful world they live in. Thank you Destin, for never losing your curiosity.

I am very fascinated by this video because I live in an area where there are no fireflies/lightning bugs. I have never seen one in real life but I really want to! It seems so cool.