Adult firefly abundance is linked to weather during the larval stage in the previous year

Abstract

1. Much is known about the brief adult phase of fireflies. However, fireflies spend a relatively long developmental period under the soil surface. Climatic and soil conditions may directly affect the eggs, larvae and pupae and indirectly affect them through predators, competitors and prey items. Climatic conditions during the early life stages of this iconic species are therefore relevant to their hypothesized decline within the context of global warming.2. We extracted data on the abundance of fireflies from the publicly available citizen data set across North America over a period of nine years. We document the effects of weather in the 24 months prior to the observations of firefly abundance based on 6761 observations. 3. Climatic conditions during both the larval and adult phases have a non-linear effect on adult firefly abundance. Maximum winter and spring temperatures and mean precipitation in the 20month period prior to the observations had the greatest impact on the abundance of firefly adults.Low maximum soil moisture during the 5-19 months preceding the observations affected the adult abundance negatively, and high maximum soil moisture positively. 4. After correcting the firefly abundance for these weather effects, we estimate that the abundance of fireflies increased over the time period of this study.5. Our study suggests that early life climatic conditions have a small but significant impact on adult firefly abundance with a total R 2 of 0.017.

Autumn bird migration phenology: A potpourri of wind, precipitation and temperature effects

“…via food) effects through which precipitation likely influences the timing of biological events. Across taxa and biological events, similarly complex precipitation effects have been suggested for, for example, plant phenology (Gordo & Sanz, ; Peñuelas et al, ), insect migration and abundance (Evans, Salvatore, Pol, & Musters, ; Zipkin, Ries, Reeves, Regetz, & Oberhauser, ), avian spring migration and reproduction (Englert Duursma, Gallagher, & Griffith, ; Gordo, ; Gordo, Brotons, Ferrer, & Comas, ; Haest et al, ) and mammal demography (Campos et al, ; Thibault, Ernest, White, Brown, & Goheen, ).…”

Partitioning the impact of environmental drivers and species interactions in dynamic aquatic communities

“…Low percentages of explained variance are quite common in studies of macroinvertebrates in aquatic systems (Leslie andLamp 2017, Little andAltermatt 2018). For example, our method based on co-occurrence is unable to detect intraspecific interactions, but may reflect indirect interactions between species in communities (Chase andLeibold 2003, Vellend 2016), and may miss time lags between predictor and response variables (Evans et al 2018). The warning of Carpenter et al (1985) against using statistics to find cause-and-effect relationships is still valid.…”

“…The warning of Carpenter et al (1985) against using statistics to find cause-and-effect relationships is still valid. For example, our method based on co-occurrence is unable to detect intraspecific interactions, but may reflect indirect interactions between species in communities (Chase andLeibold 2003, Vellend 2016), and may miss time lags between predictor and response variables (Evans et al 2018). However, random forests at least give us the opportunity to quantify relationships between taxa abundances and between taxa abundances and environmental factors in one analysis, which is relatively new in ecology.…”

Host condition and pathogen identity influence bacterial infection survival in the common eastern firefly, Photinus pyralis

“…Although location did not significantly impact mortality in our uninfected fireflies and was not retained as a covariate, our sites were very diverse in some features, such as human disturbance through mowing and light pollution, that influence firefly development (Chen et al, 2021; Evans et al, 2019). Future studies with increased collections at each location may better elucidate the impact of location.…”