Lightning Bugs Bring Summer and Joy in Baltimore and Beyond

Meteorological summer isn’t until June 20, but don’t tell that to the lightning bugs or fireflies as they are also called, because they don’t read calendars.

They come when it’s time and on their own time.

I first noticed them this past Thursday evening as they darted up and down in their artful aerial ballet of seduction over my yard with their flickering yellow-greenish lanterns desperately seeking amore in the gathering dusk.

They are as much a harbinger of summer in Maryland as Bay Bridge traffic jams, soft crabs, Anne Arundel strawberries, ringing Good Humor bells, Western Maryland peaches or the sound of an Orioles game from a front porch radio piercing a stillness of a humid summer evening.

With their dark striped greenish backs and heads of Orioles orange, they rest  for a moment on your arm, and in a lightning bug speak, telegraph a blinking message or two, and then suddenly they resume the hunt for a fair one.

They are the friendliest of insects — they don’t bite, sting or transmit diseases — their mission seems to be to bring serenity, calm and beauty to the summer.

They have been attracting the attention of humankind since antiquity, and are so venerated in Japan, that parks are specifically created for them.

Now, if you were a kid growing up in Baltimore in the late 1940s, 1950s and into the early 1960s, lightning bugs hold a special memory, and it had to do with the research of Dr. William D. McElroy, one of the world’s leading experts in bioluminescence at the time,  who pursued his research in Room 113, Mergenthaler Hall, on the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus. 

In order to gather specimens for his work, McElroy engaged a youthful net-carrying army and offered them 25 cents for every 100 lightning bugs they delivered to his lab.

This allowed collector-kids funds to attend movies at the old Boulevard Theatre on Greenmount Avenue, or order ice cream at “The Morg” on Roland Avenue — a nickname for the Morgan-Millard drugstore — now home to Petit Louis, or just have some extra money in their pockets for whatever came along.

As night fell, platoons of youngsters could be seen zigzagging across yards and fields in happy pursuit with their nets sweeping and scooping the air while others just used their hands to gather the critters.

Al Barry, who lived on Greenleaf Road and Boxhill Lane in Roland Park, recalls being a member of a “cadre of kids who were members of the Lightning Bug Brigade,” who in the mid-1950s, went hunting for them on summer evenings.

“School was out in early June, and we could stay up late, so it was one of those things kids in North Baltimore did,” recalls Barry.

“There were at least two dozen kids in my neighborhood and once it started getting dark we started gathering fireflies. We all had jars we prepared with grass and weeds and we’d catch them with our hands. We didn’t have nets,” he said.

“The deal was to see how many we could catch and the jar once filled with fireflies would glow like a little lantern. And then some parents took them someplace — we didn’t know where they went,” he said.

But their revelry became an essential component of McElory’s research.

He had discovered that the insect’s flash was the result of an enzymatic reaction to the compound ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, which was an essential component of the mating ritual.

His work in this field made McElroy world-renowned and earned him the sobriquet of “firefly man.”

“This was a period of basic science,” J. Woodward Hastings, a Harvard biologist who had worked with McElroy, told the New York Times at the time of his death in 1999. “They were not only an example, but a leading example, and they were available especially in Baltimore.”

McElroy came to Hopkins in 1946 and from 1956 to 1969 was biology department chair, where his research focused on how lightning bugs convert chemical energy into light, at a time when little was known about them.

He called his first meeting of schoolchildren in 1947, and in addition to the 25 cents per 100 fireflies offer, offered a $10 prize to the kid who brought in the most bugs to Mergenthaler Hall. In today’s money, that would be worth $100.

At the conclusion of the first “hunting” season, which began in June and ended  in mid-August, Morgan Buchner Jr., 10, of Hadley Square in Guilford, stepped up and collected the $100 bounty.

The first season was a roaring success for McElroy whose army had collected 40,000 fireflies which were carefully frozen for later experiments or immediatley dissected.

In 1952, a 14-year old boy single-handedly collected 37,000 of them.

“Life in Baltimore, for fireflies, became a chancy, precious thing. … The result of this was a mass attack on the firefly population in Baltimore and indeed, in such outlandish places as Long Island, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Delaware,” observed The Evening Sun.

In good years, McElroy’s troops netted 500,000 lightning bugs, with supplies reaching 1 million by the 1960s, which aroused fears of the friendly bugs disappearing altogether.

“Some people have complained that our collections might cut deeply into the firefly population, but the flies we’re collecting are males,” McElroy explained in a 1965 Sun interview.”The females stay in the grass and lay eggs so our collection should have no effect on population.”

McElroy left Hopkins in 1969 when he became head of the National Science Foundation and later was chancellor of the University of California at San Diego.

Reflecting on his life’s work, McElroy said in an interview, “Quite frankly, that was the most fun I had in my life.”

At his death, the New York Times observed: “Dr. McElroy has made valuable contributions to science, including the discovery that the process by which some creatures make their own natural light is closely related to the process by which all animals convert chemical energy into mechanical energy.”

Today, because of climate change, lightning bugs are under siege from habitat loss, pollution, pesticides, lack of water and over-collection. 

Also, manmade light pollution has also become an obstacle as it interferes with the lightning bugs’ courtship rituals.

This is not a problem strictly confined to the U.S., but is worldwide in scope.