u/boomboomdaboomer

I used to take long walks along the Little Miami River here in Ohio and would notice in late summer or early fall, a small bare patch in a field by the river where part of the crop was gone having been cut a few inches from the soil. Walking north with the river to my left, 30 or 40 feet away, the field to my right was about the same distance, I saw this several years in a row and would wonder what was going

Soybean stalks or corn stalks littering the trail depending on what was planted in spring and an area about the size of 10 parking spaces when corn or larger if soybeans were planted was gone.  

The trail of stalks vanished at the river. I imagined someone in a canoe coming in the dark of night to gather corn or soybean…. but why? Who would do that? It seemed like more trouble than it would be worth.

By the 4th or 5th year of seeing this I had had enough and needed to look closer. I knew how the stalks had been cut and noticed a there was path leading down the bank to the river where tree roots were exposed. They were cut in the same manner that the stalks had been.

Then, it dawned on me.

Beavers, a family of beavers, putting food away for winter. Teeth that take down the mightiest trees also harvest corn and soybeans. Beavers are, avid crop rustlers.

Most of you are too young to know of or even heard of it but pay toilets used to be a thing. I remember 5 or 10 cents to use a men’s restroom at the Cincinnati Zoo in the late sixties. In the late seventies, high school kids from Dayton, Ohio launched an effort to ban pay toilets as a prank but it caught fire and went nationwide. It is sometimes called the Day that made Donald Trump Cry. 😭 

it’s almost the same thing isn’t it??

There’s so much more to lightning bugs than you would imagine. 

How does a glowing bug get away with not being eaten? Like, lights on, I’m right here! Go ahead, eat me!

Well it’s because lighting up is a warning signal to predators. Lucibufagin is a naturally occurring steroid some species of lightning bugs produce and native predators of insects have evolved to learn this. Eat one that does have it and it dissolves and destroys a digestive system. Not all species produce lucibufagin but native insect predators wont take that chance.

Each specie also has its own distinctive blink which they use for attracting mates and they also blink for deception by mimicking other lightning bugs blink to attract and eat them for a meal AND to acquire more steroidal lucibufagin making them even more toxic if ingested. 

Imagine how many people have fed lightning bugs to frogs to watch them blink from the inside? It’s potentially a last meal for a reptile or bird. 

I learned this from a local expert on lightning bugs at an Audubon presentation last year. He has added two species to the state’s list of known species bringing the total to 28.