Mostly Harmless

dailyme:

In this one hour exposure photo taken June 22, 2009 and provided by Steve Irvine, fireflies fly in front of his home in Big Bay, Ontario in Canada. A childhood rite of passage — catching fireflies in Mason jars and watching them glow — could be fading along with the dog days of summer. Scientists are busy analyzing a summer’s worth of observations of the mesmerizing insects collected by a network of backyard volunteers in hopes of verifying whether anecdotal evidence suggesting the luminous insects are on the decline is correct, and if so, what’s behind their shrinking populations. (AP Photo/Courtesy Steve Irvine)