Since people are reading this, let me rant a bit:
One of the things you can do, as an individual, to help your local environment, is grow flowers. Even if you live in an apartment, just a flower pot on a windowsill helps - even tiny urban gardens have an outside impact on pollinators.
If you have a yard, you can replace invasive grasses with native species and nectar-rich flowers. Don’t use herbicides or pesticides. Leave leaf litter alone over the winter to provide habitat for insects. Set aside a section to “go wild”. Just like with flower pots, leaving even a small section of lawn without chemicals and frequent mowing can have an outsized impact on pollinators and native insects.
Lawns and gardens are a space where individual effort and individual care for the environment really does matter. You might not be able to reverse climate change, but you can make a migratory monarch butterfly’s day just a little better.
And tell people! Tell people how you are gardening and how you’re managing your lawn, and why. Because the most important thing you can do for the climate is talk about it.
The comic isn’t a lie. Lightning bug eggs need wet soil, and leaf litter protects the ground from drying out. The leaf litter also creates habitat for lots of small invertebrates which will become the prey of lightning bug larvae that would otherwise starve in a well manicured lawn
Easy fix - “Are there any dead leaves to protect our eggs?”
I left the leaves on our lawn last winter, and this year I saw even fewer lightning bugs. It might be kind of pointless for me to do that, because our yard backs up to a huge ravine that is completely unkept - leaves, trees, branches, etc., all fall there and are left there. So it might be like adding a few square feet to an already large area.
But …the birds. Huge flocks of black birds sometimes come by; there will sometimes be thousands of them. If I’m outside when they show up, it’s a cacophony of chirping, then when they take off you can hear the whoosh from all of them. It’s such a great sight. But… they’re digging under the leaves, so I wonder if they were getting the insects I was trying to help. :(
Most lightning bugs overwinter as larvae for two winters before pupating. A lot of the time, the weather and conditions two years prior can have a bigger effect on lightning bug numbers than the conditions that same year
Also the birds are definitely eating the insects, and that’s ok! There should be enough to go around. The bird poop is only going to support further ecological development of that soil
Ah good. I didn’t realize it was two winters. So hopefully next year we’ll see more lightning bugs.
When I was growing up I remember seeing lightning bugs everywhere during the summer. As an adult, living less than 100 miles south of that, I see far fewer of them. It’s really disturbing. And, hey, it’s good for me because I have to do less yard work.