Fireflies

Last week (was it only last week--it seems so long ago!) Teacher Stephanie invited Andrea and I come with her, Allie, and Eliza to see fireflies. We are always for any adventure but as neither of us had seen fireflies before we were more than excited and willing to come. We would be going to Liyu or Carp Lake, which I went to a couple of times last time I was here.

On the way out of town we stopped for dinner, we started with drinks- I got a passion fruit and Stephanie got plum.

The best fried chicken you will ever eat...I wish that I could push it through the computer for you all to try- YUM!!!

When we got to the lake and were asking where we needed to go to see the fireflies they told us that there was an English professor there and that if we wanted to she could tell us a little bit about fireflies before we went out. These aren't actually the eggs, but they are similar to the size and one firefly carries 8-12 eggs in their stomach.

This is the nice professor telling us about the cycle of the fireflies life- it takes a year from when they are laid in the eggs to when they lay their own eggs and die.

I also learned that females have one stripe and males have two. Females have a little bit longer torso as they are the ones that have to carry the eggs.

There are over 200 different species and I guess if we knew what we were doing we could have seen about 20 different species at the lake.

As we were walking down the stairs I looked in the shadows and saw this, if you can't tell there are two frogs, one on top of the other. Stephanie said that means that they are "married."

For some reason they had all the lights covered with red film, I don't know if it was to lighten the lights for the fireflies or for pretty- it created a cool light on the ground though.

Allie and Eliza started catching the fireflies in their drink cups, I think that at one point Eliza had 14+ in her cup. It was so cool, it reminded me of all those stories where they catch fireflies in mason jars and use them as a lantern.

One of the cups with a couple of fireflies in it.

It was so beautiful to look around and see the little lights flickering everywhere, they weren't afraid of us- at one point we had one of them walking on our hands! You couldn't even feel it.