Literally Shiny: A Firefly Video

After living practically my whole life on the East Coast, one of the things I didn’t count on when I moved west was the lack of fireflies. They were such a ubiquitous phenomenon, such a part of the environment, that it never occurred to me that they might not be everywhere in the States.

But they don’t live in California, where I lived for seven years, or in Colorado, which I’ve called home for the better part of a decade now. I miss them.

But it helps a lot to see this lovely time-lapse (kinda) video of fireflies, shot by Vincent Brady.

Nice. And he used a clever technique for some of the effects. A video is really just a series of still images played rapidly, fooling your brain in to seeing motion. Brady took thousands of still images and strung them together to make the video. For some, he let the frames fade in, linger, then fade out again. The end result is you see the light from the fireflies persist for a few seconds before dimming, with insects at all different distances creating a stop-motion-like dance.

Incidentally, the compound that generates the light is called luciferin (Lucifer was the mythological bringer of light), which is the same class of substrate used by dinoflagellates to glow. I spent an evening kayaking on a lake filled with such protists, and watching the blue sparks fly every time I put the oar in the water was magical.

Nature is amazing. It’s wonderful what happens if you take hydrogen, helium, and a splash of lithium, and let them mix for a few billion years.

Tip of the adenosine triphosphate to Boing Boing.