Scientists want your help counting
fireflies. Mark Brush reports researchers
hope to answer a commonly asked question:
Transcript
Scientists want your help counting
fireflies. Mark Brush reports researchers
hope to answer a commonly asked question:
People often ask, ‘Why don’t we see as many fireflies anymore?’
Don Salvatore is an educator at Boston’s Museum of Science. He says he and other
researchers don’t have a good answer. They don’t even know whether there are fewer
fireflies or not.
So Salvatore and a few bug scientists started up the Firefly Watch Project. They’re
asking people to help them out by spending a few minutes in their backyard.
“So what we want them to do is to go outside at night and then for a ten second period
count the number of fireflies they see. As well as that we ask them to just key in on a
couple of fireflies and give us just a little information.”
Salvatore says they hope to discover whether thinks like frequent lawn mowing, light
pollution, and pesticides are harming firefly numbers.
For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.