“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” shouted a villager, brandishing something like a scythe.
It’s rare enough to see outsiders in a mountain village, let alone one moving suspiciously in the dark. Lei Ping hastily reassured her questioner she was there for the fireflies.
She laughs about it now, years later, but hasn’t forgotten the fear and anticipation she felt back then, during her night-time journeys in search of the insects. Lei Ping often entered the woods alone, equipped with just a camera and a red-light torch, the only sound the wind rustling the trees.
“The first step into the dark is the scariest,” recalls Lei Ping. That is, until she finds the twinkle of fireflies, with luminous specks of orange, green or yellow dancing in the darkness. “It’s beautiful, like a starry night right in front of you.”
Lei Ping is the founder of a Guangzhou-based firefly conservation initiative called “Keep the Fireflies Glowing”. She has worked actively on protecting the insects for nearly a decade. What draws her and other conservationists like her to seek out and protect fireflies is not just their mesmerising glow, but their sorrow for the threatened insects. They believe commercial demand, habitat destruction and light pollution have put fireflies under increasing pressure.
Catching and releasing fireflies
There are about 2,000 species of fireflies in the world, including terrestrial, aquatic and semi-aquatic varieties, not all of which are able to emit light. China is home to nearly 200 of them.
The country has had a longstanding cultural affinity for these insects, as celebrated in classic poems and prose. A traditional saying, used to encourage children to study, references a scholar who read by the light of fireflies caught in a bag because his family couldn’t afford lamp oil. But nowadays, fireflies are hardly ever found in China’s urban areas, or in rural parts of the country’s north and east.
Partly because of this rarity, fireflies are caught by their thousands and released as spectacular displays in varied events: from weddings, to event launches for new property developments, companies or products. The insects are also placed in glass jars and given as gifts for birthdays and on Chinese Valentine’s Day, which falls during the seventh month of the lunar calendar – often around August – when some firefly species are active.
But where do all these fireflies come from?
A firefly larva can take around one to two years to mature, and exist for about two weeks as a pupa before transforming into an adult. For a few weeks, it then engages in courtship displays, using its bioluminescence, and attempts to mate before it dies. This long lifecycle makes it unlikely they are farmed in sufficiently large numbers to feature in display events as and when required, experts say.
From 2014 to 2016, wild-caught fireflies were being funnelled through a well-established supply chain – from capture to online trade and wholesale distribution – for release at scenic attractions and parks, according to a 2016 report on the firefly trade by Huazhong Agricultural University. Dozens of online stores were found to be selling fireflies via e-commerce platform Taobao in numerous cities every year. Large numbers of fireflies would die during shipment.
Lei Ping, then a university student, assisted with investigations into the firefly trade for the report. Volunteers and scholars across China she spoke with were all against the large-scale commercial exploitation of wild-caught fireflies, she notes.
In 2017, Taobao responded to widespread pressure by banning the sale of live fireflies on its platform, including those that sellers claimed were artificially propagated.
However, the sale and recreational release of fireflies persists, and vendors can still be found online. The Chinese video-sharing website Bilibili is one example. Typically, the videos show stacks of jars containing fireflies twinkling in the darkness. Some vendors claim to show farmed fireflies, but offer little evidence to support this.
“It’s easy to tell that most firefly release events involve fireflies captured from the wild,” Jia Ci, of the environmental group Nature Unfolded, told Dialogue Earth. He explains that the cost of artificially breeding fireflies is high, and there are significant limitations in terms of time and species. As a result, artificial breeding can hardly meet the demands of commercial release activities.
A stack of threats
The mass harvest and commercial release of wild-caught fireflies is just one problem, however. There is also habitat degradation.
In 2023, Lei Ping and volunteers from Keep the Fireflies Glowing and Nature Unfolded learned of a firefly habitat in Guangzhou threatened by a highway-expansion project. Fireflies had not been mentioned in the project’s environmental impact assessment (EIA). Between May and June that year, she conducted a month-long survey at the site and recorded 10 firefly species, one of which was previously unknown. Another new species was discovered that winter.
Firefly larvae have very limited mobility and depend on one habitat for six months to a year. Adult terrestrial fireflies generally have a horizontal range of 100-500m and a vertical range of less than 5m, says Xu Guorui, an associate researcher at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Habitat is crucial for them, and the fireflies are unlikely to reach another suitable one if it is destroyed.
Many types of fireflies can only survive in specific conditions. Highly sensitive to changes, they are indicator species for environmental health. “Their presence, numbers, or behaviour may reflect ecosystem health or changes in the environment,” Xu notes. Light pollution, pesticides, and soil and water pollution can all significantly disrupt firefly habitats.
It was in response to the highway-expansion project that Lei Ping launched the “Vanishing Firefly Park” initiative, to promote protection for the affected habitat. The project seeks to raise awareness by getting visitors to the site – volunteers and members of the public – to witness the fireflies in the areas under threat, and learn more via educational materials the group designed. Lei Ping also joined the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s Firefly Specialist Group and wrote a letter of concern on its behalf to the government about the highway project.
Jia Ci and the Nature Unfolded team are core members of this initiative, which raised concerns about the EIA reports. The authorities’ official response stated that the EIA report contained “supplemental analysis of impacts on fireflies, along with protection measures”. It also stated that the lead contractor was required to conduct an “in-depth investigation” into the conservation status of the fireflies. However, it noted that the firefly-protection measures mentioned in the EIA were vague and perfunctory, and by end-2024, the results of any investigations were yet to be seen. Meanwhile, the expansion project continued with no sign of the protection measures being implemented.
When Xu was conducting a study into soil health between 2022 and 2023, using fireflies as an indicator species, nearby villagers and long-time staff at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden told him they felt firefly numbers had plummeted over the past 20 years. This local perspective aligns with a worrying global trend in the last two decades. “The massive decline in both type and number of fireflies is supported by surveys and data”, he says. For example, along Peninsular Malaysia’s Selangor River, numbers of the mangrove firefly Pteroptyx tener fell by 38% from 2007-2013. And across various sites in England, observation of the Lampyris noctiluca glow-worm showed a significant population decline between 2001 and 2015.
In 2020, a study in BioScience determined that the three main extinction-level threats to fireflies worldwide were habitat loss, artificial light, and pesticide use. In separate regions, water pollution, unmanaged tourism and climate change were also found to jeopardise firefly survival. A 2024 article published in the journal Insects confirmed that declining firefly numbers were linked to these factors.
Xu’s investigations found that firefly numbers fell significantly in areas of open woodland – an ecosystem characterised by widely spaced trees – that had been developed to varying degrees. Frequent weather extremes, like the 2024 drought in Xishuangbanna, were also found to have reduced firefly numbers and delayed the population’s peak-activity period.
Experts say the lack of information available about the current condition of the firefly population in China is concerning.
Cao Chengquan, a professor at the College of Life Sciences in Leshan Normal University, Sichuan, has been studying fireflies and other insects for many years. He calls the current situation with fireflies in China “disturbing”. He adds that conditions are better in some locations than others but says “unfortunately, it’s all speculation for now. There has never been a China-wide survey, or one conducted in the main firefly-habitat provinces; neither at national nor provincial level”. This is down to few people being engaged in research and calling for surveys, along with a general lack of support around such endeavours, Cao notes.
A long road ahead for legal protections
Though few in the public have paid attention, volunteer-led appeals, along with research and proposals from scholars, have managed to put fireflies on the legal map.
In 2023, China added 11 of its 200 firefly species to its register of land animals protected because they have “significant ecological, scientific and social value”. This means submissions must be filed for artificially propagating them, but how far inclusion on the register protects the species from being captured in the wild is unclear.
“The register offers little in the way of protections,” Jia Ci tells Dialogue Earth. “In legal practice, it holds a very low priority. Combined with the difficulty of gathering evidence and the generally low level of public attention, it becomes extremely hard to hold anyone accountable when there are unregulated firefly-release activities.”
Cao’s research found that numerous obstacles remained in the enforcement of the new submission requirement. Many people were unaware of it, for one, and the procedure for filing the paperwork for firefly propagation was unclear. For Cao, there was also a lack of scientific rigour in the selection of firefly species for the register: “How comprehensive and effective was the process of information disclosure when the register was compiled? Are the 11 firefly species really the ones that should be protected first? These matters need to be examined and discussed.”
Lei Ping says firefly protection is still in its infancy in China, and the lack of details and attention paid to it remains an issue. For instance, she notes that street-lighting schemes for rural areas are causing light pollution due to excessive brightness, interfering with fireflies’ ability to signal to one another. “Streetlighting could be specially designed to reduce disruption to fireflies,” Lei Ping says. She points out that fireflies are less sensitive to orange and yellow lighting than white LED lights typical of streetlights. “Adjusting the angle and [colour] of lighting to reduce its impact on fireflies and other light-sensitive animals is actually not hard to do.”
Industrialisation and artificial breeding
While the conservation status of fireflies is concerning, public interest has been growing in China, with increasing numbers of viewing activities and more conservation parks being built.
Progress on firefly conservation has been made in sectors such as tourism, culture, and education. Night-time firefly-viewing events in southern Chinese cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen combine firefly appreciation with education. In the Jiulong National Wetland Park in Zhejiang province, fireflies extend across an area of more than 114 hectares, and the park runs firefly-viewing activities that encourage viewers not to disturb the insects. Meanwhile, Sichuan’s Qingshen county runs an annual firefly festival which has boosted tourism to the area.
However, such tourism is largely limited to the fireflies’ active season in the summer, and protection alone is not enough if firefly tourism is to be viable year-round, according to Cao.
While he opposes the release of fireflies solely as visual spectacle, Cao believes that since there is already a large demand for fireflies, commercialisation via artificial propagation is a necessary part of protecting them.
Cao cites the benefits that fireflies can bring to farmers. Their presence in rice paddies and tea plantations signifies low levels of pollution and pesticide. So, he says, it can be used to promote products like rice and tea.
As capturing fireflies in the wild on an industrial scale is unfeasible, artificial propagation of fireflies is therefore a necessity for the purposes of agriculture, tourism and cultural activity. But high costs and lengthy breeding cycles remain barriers.
“They’re not easy to breed,” says Lei Ping, who herself raises fireflies. “It takes a lot of time and effort, and you need to have a deep understanding of their habits. You have to raise snails to feed the larvae, and you have to change the water.” Because air-conditioning is used, “a power outage during a heatwave could kill more than half of them. They can get fungal infections if you don’t clean out the feed residue in time,” she notes. Additionally, for many species of firefly larvae, their diet is still not known.
It is because of such challenges that propagation methods are so important. Cao says his team has mastered breeding techniques for at least five firefly species, allowing for multiple breeding cycles in the year. Scaling up these techniques will bring costs down significantly. The team is currently collaborating with scenic attraction sites, businesses and government bodies looking to develop the night-time economy.
“Firefly tourism has to seamlessly combine nature education, science popularisation, and habitat creation and restoration, all locally integrated to ensure that the protection of fireflies is implemented sustainably,” says Jia Ci of Nature Unfolded.
“Strictly speaking, what’s needed for fireflies is dedicated habitat protection”, says Cao. “But we also need to develop breeding techniques. Would fireflies be endangered if it were easy to breed them? Would anyone still go out to catch them?” Cao points out that when their habitat is protected or regenerated, they can bounce back. In terms of their reproductive capacity, “they are beetles, not giant pandas,” he says.
