Lightning bugs are beetles

I actually found this out last weekend while moseying about the Houston Museum of Natural Science, but I've been far too busy the last week at work to sit and write down all the shit I've been learning. Yeah, yeah, I know; that sorta defeats the whole purpose of this journal, but that's not what's important right now. What's important right now is that I found out that fireflies aren't flies.

Actually, I kinda knew they weren't flies. I actually considered 'em something like mosquitos (the bugs, not the Central American Indians). But in fact they're beetles. Just like those twisty antlered hardshell battle bugs that roll up piles of poopoo and give sacred shape-shifting, man-killing power to reanimated Egyptian priests from the XXIXth Dynasty whenever English archeologists whose girlfriends look just like an ancient Egyptian princess they used to boff open up their tombs. I woulda never guessed.

Apparently they got the idea to light up their gizzards as an alternative way of pissing out pheromones when it's time for them to make firefly whoopie. Perhaps at one point in geological history, the earth got to be so stinky a place that igniting their cabooses became a more distinctive (and therefor more advantageous) way of signaling potential mates that it's time to mate. So they went visual instead of olfactorial as a means of getting the attention of their paramours. Oddly enough, humans did the same thing--given how we smell less and look more for getting laid, compared to other animals.

Ah, but now humans have gotten so good at mating up batches of replacements that we've overrun the planet with lights--a side effect of human success-pollution. And all this light pollution makes it tough for fireflies to find them some nookie in the areas where humans dwell. Perhaps, if humans stay around long enough to "permanently" adapt the environments of the 2200 species of known lightning bugs, our little hardbody friends will quit lighting up and go back to farting pheromones as the preferred method for meeting available singles.

But for now, candles seem still to trump aromatherapy.