Tuesday, October 14, 2003

By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer

There's a bug with Pennsylvania's state insect. No one knows for sure if it even lives in this state. The story of how that came to be hinges on small subtleties of science, but a local scientist believes there are big-picture reasons why it matters. "This wasn't stupid. It just turns out that we know very little," says John Rawlins, a Carnegie Museum of Natural History bug expert who noticed the discrepancy this spring and who has proposed a study to straighten it out.

The state insect, if you don't have it memorized, is the firefly, adopted by the General Assembly back in 1974. In 1987, lawmakers officially specified the species of firefly they'd had in mind: Photuris pensylvanica.

	John Rawlins, a Carnegie Museum of Natural History bug expert, wants to take a closer look at the origin of the state's official insect, the firefly. (John Beale/Post-Gazette)

That was the species that third-graders at Highland Park Elementary School in Upper Darby, near Philadelphia, had petitioned the legislature to pick.

It had been given that name, and that spelling, by the great entomologist C. DeGeer because he believed this insect -- of the genus Photuris, Greek for "lighted tail" -- had been collected in Pennsylvania (pensylvanica). However, he named the bug in 1774, when Pennsylvania was still a British colony, and one whose borders were vague.

As defined by state borders today, the area where the original Photuris pensylvanica specimens came from could actually be Delaware, Maryland, New York or Ohio. Twenty-four firefly species (of eight genera) are known to occur in the state of Pennsylvania, but there has not been a documented discovery of pensylvanica here, Rawlins discovered.

Even though his own specialty is moths, that intrigued Rawlins, the associate curator in charge of the museum's Section of Invertebrate Zoology. These generally smaller creatures, even though they make up the vast majority of life on Earth, are not very well understood. Rawlins is one of the strong voices for learning more.

Rawlins has proposed a study to identify the different kinds of fireflies in the state.

Figuring the so-called lightning bug might make as good a lightning rod as any bug, especially given its official state status, Rawlins recently asked for $32,733 from the state Wild Resource Conservation Fund to do a study of Pennsylvania fireflies.

He suspects that this state is home to at least nine genera and more than 40 species, some of which have been documented in neighboring states. He suspects they'll find our state bug here, too.

"We won't require a replacement bug," he says.

But it'll be good to know the scientific truth. And he and his colleagues would go deeper than that.

The 10 or so species of Photuris genus fireflies look so much alike that Rawlins wants to differentiate them using the museum's high-tech equipment to analyze their DNA. They might discover that some of these species are in fact the same.

He'll be joined by colleagues Robert Davidson and James Fetzner, who is a molecular specialist, as well as Charles Bier of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

Why bother to find out more about fireflies?

Rawlins knows we're not talking about star critters like brook trout (the state fish) or whitetail deer (the state animal) or even the ruffed grouse (the state bird).

"We like fireflies -- no more," he says with a big smile. But besides the aesthetic charm of their flashing lights, these little predators and their larval young have important places in the ecological system and deserve stewardship, too.

Did he say predators?

"Oh, they're vicious. They're killers," Rawlins says, noting how some females even flash fake mating signals to attract males to eat.

That's a dramatic example of the kinds of things we can't know until we do the science, on creatures small as well as great.

"This is the 21st century," Rawlins says. "We really are irresponsible if we don't take some of our resources and get a better handle on what's here."

Correction/Clarification (Published Oct. 15, 2003): The Oct. 14, 2003 version of this story on questions about the state insect misidentified the sex of fireflies that send out false mating signals. Some females -- not males -- do this to attract males of other species and then eat them.

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