By LINDA LOMBARDI
For Associated Press
The fireflies on Denise Wade's property in Mont-gomery, Texas, are so magical that they remind her of a very different time of year.
"I can say safely that there are thousands," she says, "and they're at all levels and they're blinking like Christmas lights. It's awesome."
Wade has seen the number of fireflies increase since she bought her property, but a lot of people have a different experience. In parts of the world where firefly populations have been monitored for a long time, such as Japan, their numbers are down. And scientists think the same might be true in the United States.
"You hear people saying, growing up I saw fireflies all the time, now I don't see them anymore," says Christopher Cratsley, a professor at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts who studies them.
Are fireflies disappearing? Answering that question is part of the goal of Firefly Watch, based at the Museum of Science in Boston. In the first year of the program last year, more than 1,400 people provided their own observations from as far away from Boston as Texas, Kansas and even India.
Contributing to Firefly Watch takes just a few minutes a week, but there's a lot to learn about these creatures. Start with the fact that they're not flies, they're beetles.
Although we only see them for a short time in the summer, fireflies are surprisingly long-lived, but they spend most of their lives -- up to two years -- as grubs underground. The nighttime lights that we see represent only about the last two weeks of their lives.
And what's the point of that magical display, anyway? It's all about producing more fireflies.