When I was a child, I lived in Taishan Street, Dalian, with mountains in the south, north and west directions, as well as small rivers and reservoirs, locust forest, apple forest, and peach forest. Dalian's summer weather is hot, the evening is relatively cool, people can't stay in the house, they will go to the yard or the street to cool off. When it's cool on the street, people use the light of street lights to play poker, or sit on the side of the street to chat and tell stories.
There are many mountains and forests near Taishan, and in the summer evenings, you can often see some green fluorescent light wandering in the night sky, whenever you see these fluorescences, there will be many children chasing after them, they are chasing while shouting, very happy. Sometimes, when the fluorescence flies low, it will be caught by people, and the glowing insects can be seen clearly in the hand. The little bug is as long as a small sea meter, flattened, with a black body, and the head and body are joined together in a semi-circle. The back is slightly stiffer, like a few decks buckled on it. The head has a number of tentacles, the abdomen is chestnut-shaped, and the tail can emit a yellow-green cold light.
The adults said that it was a firefly, and the more you went into the old ditch, the more you walked. The fireflies in our hands had a strange smell, and some adults frightened us, "Don't catch it, it flew from Lao MaGou."
Old Magou is a mass burial site, and no one usually dares to go there. The adults say yes, but our fun chasing fireflies continues unabated. Whenever they saw fireflies, the children would chase and run, shouting as they ran.
Once, my father led me to the old magou to turn over the sweet potato vines. My dad planted a lot of sweet potatoes there. One day, the work was done late and worked until dark. When night shrouded the old magou, it was surrounded by dark woods and graves lying in the woods. When the night wind blows, the woods will make waves, which is a little scary. When the work was almost finished, Dad said, "You rest on the ground for a while, and I'll finish the rest in a moment." ”
I stood on the ground and looked around, and the graves in the woods lay like beasts in the night, lying motionless, frightening. I looked up and saw countless points of light wandering in the air, and as these points of light moved, a series of bright lights appeared in the air. These bright lights flickered and flashed, like small lanterns lit by someone. It's just that the light of these small lanterns is too weak, and only the bright light can be seen moving rapidly in the air, but no light can hit the ground. These lights are more and more, groups, clusters, and there are also strips. There are a lot of bright lights gently flying in my direction, they fly up and down, drawing a chain of color in the air, which is very magical. I carefully observed the bright lights that flew closer, and I could see that they were small black worms, flying up or down beside me, circling, and the light of the tail flashed, as if they were little elves dancing in the night sky.
I tried to catch these lights with my hands, and these lights did not hide from me, and I caught one all at once. I put it in the palm of my hand to observe carefully, and it turned out to be the tail of the little bug glowing. I put the little bugs into the soda bottle, and went to catch the second and third ones, and the more I caught, the brighter the soda bottles became, greener and brighter, very beautiful.
After a while, Dad said, "Okay, let's go home." ”
I sat in the back seat of my dad's bike and walked home on the dirt road in Old Magou. When I walked to the woods, I found that the light in the woods was more bright, and Dad said, "That's a firefly, and some of these little bugs are in the summer, and they can't be kept." ”
When Dad's car came out of the old ma ditch to the fork in the pool, the little bugs in the bottle no longer glowed. I opened the cap and poured out all the fireflies. After a while, the fireflies I had poured out all flew up, and they continued to flicker in the cold light of the night sky.
In the fifth grade of elementary school, I borrowed a set of "100,000 Whys" books, in which I learned the secrets of fireflies.
Fireflies are arthropod phylums of the family Fireflies, belonging to the insect family, the suborder Pteropodidae, the coleoptera, and the suborder Polyphalus, and belongs to a family of the family Fluorenidae. There are 2,000 known species of fireflies worldwide, distributed in tropical, subtropical and temperate regions. There are 54 species in 10 genera in China. Common species are: Chinese yellow firefly, mountain window firefly, yellow edge firefly.
Fireflies have phosphide luminescent matter in the tail, which can emit yellow-green cold light through the action of luminescent enzymes; females are mostly missing wings. Male adults emit light to attract the opposite sex, the luminous time is generally only maintained for 2 to 3 hours, different varieties of flash intervals are not the same, and their lifespan is generally only 5 days to 2 weeks.
Fireflies prefer to live near water or in humid environments and are usually nocturnal. He likes to prey on mollusks such as snails and slugs and animals such as earthworms. After they acquire their prey, they use their palates to inject secretions into their prey, digest them in vitro, and then inhale them into the body. Usually a snail will have many fireflies to share. Fireflies' eggs, larvae, pupae and adults can all glow. Usually, after the male fireflies emit a flash of light during flight in the air, the female fireflies will emit a response light, and the male fireflies will find the female fireflies to mate and reproduce. Biologists have found that when a male firefly wants to mate with a female firefly, its ventral tail flashes light at a certain frequency, and it expects the female firefly to respond to the same light. Fireflies have thousands of light cells in their abdomen, which contain fluorescein and fluorescent enzymes, and when oxygen enters the cell, it causes the two substances to chemically react and emit light.
Scientists put fireflies into an empty box and inject oxygen and nitric oxide into the box for experiments. When the nitric oxide in the empty box is increased, the firefly's abdomen begins to flicker and continue to glow, and when the nitric oxide supply is stopped, the firefly's light is extinguished. Scientists have found that the enzyme that makes nitric oxide is next to the light cells that emit light, and the researchers speculate that the neural signals in the fireflies will initiate the manufacture of nitric oxide. When nitric oxide is manufactured and sent to light cells, the mitochondria in the cell that produce energy by consuming oxygen are shut down, allowing oxygen to enter the light cells. When fireflies turn off the function of mitochondrial cells, fireflies glow. When I learned about the glow of fireflies, I was no longer interested in them.
Today's Taishan, Dalian has become a bustling urban area, the creek and Taishan Reservoir of Laomagou have disappeared, the apple orchards and peach orchards are gone, the environment on which fireflies live is gone, and it is difficult to see the flowing fireflies on summer nights now.