As the sun sets in the Japanese town of Tatsuno, thousands of fireflies begin glowing, producing a spectacle that usually draws crowds of delighted visitors, but this year, the dance of the incandescent insects is being performed without spectators, after COVID-19 prevention measures forced organizers of a popular firefly festival to cancel the event.
The decision might have disappointed fans of the brilliant bugs, but it provides an unusually serene atmosphere as the insects blink on and off, appearing to dance through the black night air.
The natural spectacle lasts just 10 days in early summer and is the final chapter of a firefly’s life.
Photo: AFP
“The glowing is the courtship behavior of fireflies. They glow to communicate between the male and the female,” said Katsunori Funaki, from the city’s tourism division.
“During the short, 10-day period, they find a partner and lay eggs for the next year,” he said.
When conditions are right, with neither rain nor wind, as many as 30,000 fireflies perform their magic during the 10-day period in Tatsuno, a town set on a river in central Nagano Prefecture.
“Historical records say a massive number of fireflies were seen along the Tenryu River in the late 19th through early 20th century,” Tatsuno Mayor Yasuo Takei said.
However, the creature almost died out in the area, as silk production and other industries flourished further upstream, creating pollution.
After World War II, the town worked hard to restore the environment and protect fireflies, and the insects now attract tens of thousands of visitors during the annual summer firefly festival.
“When we have lots of fireflies, we get a spectacular landscape full of lights, with both stars and glowing fireflies reflected in the water,” Takei said.
Fireflies are often said to be evidence of a pristine natural environment, but the insects only thrive when other conditions are also met.
“To help fireflies, we need to have a snail called kawanina,” Funaki said.
Fireflies spend about nine months of their year-long lifecycle growing in fresh water, and baby insects grow by eating the snail, Funaki said.
The town has also created a park complete with ditches to bring in fresh water from the river and waterfalls to produce an oxygen-rich aquatic home for the insects.
The silence of this year’s mating season makes the ritual all the more poignant, Takei said.
“The brief shining of the light is so impressive, making me feel that I also have to live my best,” he said.
Firefly festivals are staged around late June in many parts of Japan, and the glowing courtship ritual has long been celebrated in the country.
“This may be part of Japan’s unique aesthetics, but they are so precious to us because we can only see them for a short period of time,” Takei said.
Festival organizer Tatsuki Komatsu said he felt the insects were “looking for a partner more freely with no humans around,” but said he hoped the festival could be held again next year.
“Fireflies are a creature that grows over a year and flies for only 10 days to leave behind the next generation before dying,” he said.
“We want to take care of them so that they will leave eggs for next year and we will once again see fireflies dance wonderfully,” he said.
Ethiopia’s Afar region on Friday called on civilians to take up arms against rebels from neighboring Tigray, signaling a potential escalation in fighting that has already displaced tens of thousands this week. “Every Afar should protect their land with any means available, whether by guns, sticks or stones,” regional President Awol Arba said in an interview aired by regional state media. “No weapons can make us kneel down. We will win this war with our strong determination.” Tigrayan rebels launched operations in Afar last weekend, saying they were targeting pro-government troops massing along the two regions’ shared border. A government official said on
The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has fully vaccinated 90 percent of its eligible adult population within just seven days, the Bhutanese Ministry of Health said on Tuesday. The tiny country, wedged between India and China and home to nearly 800,000 people, began giving out second doses on Tuesday last week in a mass drive that has been hailed by the UN Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) as “arguably the fastest vaccination campaign to be executed during a pandemic.” Bhutan grabbed headlines in April when its government said it had inoculated about the same percentage of eligible adults with the first dose
‘LIBERATE HONG KONG’: The prosecution argued that the slogan was in the tradition of rallying cries for secession dating back to the Qin and Qing dynasties Three Hong Kong judges are to rule tomorrow whether the protest slogan: “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times” is a call for secession when they deliver a verdict on charges against a man arrested at a demonstration last year. The landmark ruling could have long-term implications for how a Beijing-imposed National Security Law against secession, terrorism, subversion and collusion with foreign forces reshapes the territory’s common law traditions, some legal scholars say. Democracy advocates say that a ruling to outlaw the slogan would tighten limits on free speech. The slogan was last year chanted during democracy protests, posted online, scrawled on walls,
African nations should build capacity to produce vaccines on the continent and work with pharmaceutical companies to ensure that the raw materials needed to produce the inoculations are available, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said. While a waiver on the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights that is being discussed at the WTO is seen as a way to improve the supply of COVID-19 vaccines to the world’s least inoculated continent, Okonjo-Iweala said that only a handful of African countries have the capacity to produce the life-saving drugs. “There [are] a handful of countries — maybe Tunisia, Morocco to some extent,
RSS