Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
A Brand So Nice They Named It a Thousand Times
I did not set out to write about fireflies. I set out to drink a beer.
Three Notched Brewing makes a beer called Firefly Nights, which is exactly the kind of name that makes you feel like you are supposed to be sitting on a porch in the Blue Ridge watching the tree line blink at you in lazy morse code while something good happens on the grill. It is a beautiful name. It is also, I have come to learn, one of approximately ten thousand things currently calling itself Firefly.
Consider the evidence:
- My internet service is Firefly.
- There is a bar and restaurant not far from me also called Firefly.
- Adobe Firefly is an AI image generation product I use occasionally.
- Firefly Aerospace is launching rockets and landing on the moon, probably in the dark, probably without asking anyone.
- The television show Firefly, Joss Whedon’s beloved space western that Fox cancelled in 2002 before anyone could stop it, has been haunting nerds ever since.
- NIO’s Firefly is a tiny electric car aimed at the European market, available in lavender, lemon, and beige, which sounds less like a car and more like a candle collection.
- In the DNA and RNA next-generation sequencing space there is a Firefly library prep product.
- There is a Firefly advertising network that wraps taxis and rideshares in screens and calls it a data-first mobility solution.
- There is the Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Delaware.
- There is Firefly Lane on Netflix, which is a show about women having feelings across multiple decades.
- Amazon had a Firefly feature on its Fire Phone, a device so catastrophically unsuccessful it became a Harvard Business School case study in what happens when you mistake confidence for a product strategy.
- And there is a children’s toothbrush brand called Firefly that plays music for two minutes so children brush their teeth long enough.
Note: I hate children. I want to establish that now, up front, before we go any further. It is not a new position. It is not something I arrived at recently. It is load-bearing information for the end of this piece, so please hold it.
The Actual Fireflies Would Like a Word
Here is something happening quietly underneath all of this branding: the real fireflies are disappearing.
Casual observers and scientists alike are reporting fewer fireflies, with studies showing that habitat loss, rising temperatures, light pollution, and drought threaten these beloved bugs. The mechanism is particularly cruel. Fireflies communicate entirely in light. They find each other, warn each other, and reproduce through a language of bioluminescent flash patterns that evolution spent millions of years perfecting. Human light pollution is believed to interrupt those flash patterns, and scientists have observed that synchronous fireflies get out of sync for several minutes after a single car’s headlights pass.
We didn’t even have to try. We just left the lights on.
Some studies have reported that artificial lighting can significantly reduce firefly mating success, with reductions in reproductive activity sometimes exceeding 50 percent, depending on the species and conditions. Think about that. We made the night so bright that fireflies can’t find each other anymore. They are sending signals into a sky full of noise and getting nothing back.
And before you feel too superior about your own mating strategies, consider that darkness has historically been doing a lot of heavy lifting for the less conventionally attractive among us. Yes, last call is followed by the lights coming all the way up, which is the bar industry’s way of saying the experiment is over and everyone should see exactly what they have done. Perhaps that is the correct policy. Perhaps the ugly people should not mate. I say this as one of them. I have standing. The fireflies, at least, had a system that worked until we broke it. We never had a system. We just had low lighting and optimism and occasionally we deserved each other.
Of the roughly 150 firefly species scientists have formally assessed out of more than 2,600 worldwide, 20 percent are already threatened with extinction. That is fewer than 7 percent of all species even looked at. We don’t know enough about most of them to confirm they are in trouble. We just know the yards are darker than they used to be, except for all the lights we left on.
Karie just said, “You’re spiraling about fireflies.”
“I’m doing research,” I said.
“You started because you were drinking a beer.”
“The beer was the inciting incident.”
She is back to whatever she was reading. Señor Hector “Queso” Suarez DDS is looking at me with the expression of a creature who has also noticed fewer fireflies but has chosen to focus on the possible treat situation instead, which is honestly a healthier approach.
The Firefly Union Convenes an Emergency Session
The following is an excerpt from the official minutes of the International Brotherhood of Lampyridae, Local 1, convened on the back fence at dusk, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region.
CHAIR (a large male Photinus pyralis, third summer): I am calling this meeting to order. There are several items on the agenda. Item one: our brand has been compromised.
DELEGATE FROM THE CREEK BED: Compromised how?
CHAIR: Adobe is using our name to generate AI images of things that were not supposed to exist.
DELEGATE FROM THE CREEK BED: Are any of the images of actual fireflies?
CHAIR: Some. They glow wrong.
DELEGATE FROM THE TALL GRASS: What about the rocket company?
CHAIR: Firefly Aerospace. They are landing on the moon.
DELEGATE FROM THE TALL GRASS: The moon is dark.
CHAIR: That is not the point.
DELEGATE FROM THE MEADOW EDGE: There is a beer.
CHAIR: Yes. Three Notched Brewing. Firefly Nights.
DELEGATE FROM THE MEADOW EDGE: Is it good.
CHAIR: I have not been consulted. I was not asked. None of us were asked. There is also a bar. A restaurant. An internet company. A music festival in Delaware. A taxi advertising network. A television program about a spaceship —
DELEGATE FROM THE CREEK BED: That one was actually pretty good.
CHAIR: It was cancelled after one season.
DELEGATE FROM THE CREEK BED: We have so much in common.
CHAIR: There is a children’s toothbrush.
(Long pause.)
DELEGATE FROM THE TALL GRASS: With our name on it?
CHAIR: With our name on it. It plays music for two minutes so children brush their teeth long enough.
DELEGATE FROM THE MEADOW EDGE: Children put us in jars.
CHAIR: I know.
DELEGATE FROM THE MEADOW EDGE: They poke holes in the lid with a pencil and tell themselves that’s enough.
CHAIR: I know.
DELEGATE FROM THE TALL GRASS: It is never enough.
CHAIR: (quietly) I know.
(A truck goes by on the road. For a full thirty seconds, every delegate goes dark. The synchronization collapses. It takes a while for anyone to find the rhythm again.)
CHAIR: The light pollution agenda item has been tabled. We all know the light pollution agenda item.
DELEGATE FROM THE CREEK BED: It disrupts mating.
CHAIR: Everything disrupts mating. The streetlights. The pesticides. The development. The Chinese electric car company that made us available in lavender. We used to be everywhere in this county. Every summer night. You could read by us if enough of us were together.
DELEGATE FROM THE TALL GRASS: The human with the blog remembers.
CHAIR: They all remember. They write about it wistfully in October and then leave the porch light on all night in June.
DELEGATE FROM THE MEADOW EDGE: What do we do?
CHAIR: We keep flashing. We find each other in the dark. We do the only thing we know how to do.
DELEGATE FROM THE CREEK BED: And the branding?
CHAIR: Let them have it. A beer. A rocket. A toothbrush. A taxi ad. They can name a thousand things after us. It won’t make us come back.
(The meeting is adjourned. The fence goes dark.)
As Promised, a Brief Note on (French) Children
The French word for firefly is luciole.
It is a beautiful word. It sounds like the name of a woman in a Truffaut film who makes one elegant mistake and everyone understands her completely. Luciole. You almost don’t mind that it’s a bug.
I recently spent time in Marrakech, where French children are apparently on some kind of international tour of maximum volume and zero behavioral consequence. They are feral in a way that suggests their parents have made a philosophical choice. They are loud in the medina. They are loud in the souks. They are loud in places where everyone else has somehow agreed, without speaking, to be quiet. They are, in short, everything I hate about children, but louder and in a more beautiful city, which makes it worse.
French children make luicole want to be in jars with no holes poked in the topped.
There is an old English expression: children should be seen and not heard.
There is, as it turns out, a French expression that is entirely the same.
Les enfants ne doivent pas être vus et être morts comme une luciole.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- They Named Everything Firefly - May 7, 2026
- Marrakech v. America - May 5, 2026
- They Parachuted the Beaver - May 5, 2026
