To Prove Something Was Alive, We Killed 100 Million of Them

[00:00:00]Here's a number, 1 cent. That was the going rate, a penny paid for a living thing. No questions asked about how you caught it or how many you killed getting there. The buyer was a chemical company and the sellers were mostly children.

[00:00:16]And over about 35 years, they moved close to 100 million of them. 100 million fireflies bought by the jar, shipped across state lines, ground into powder. There was no crime here. Nobody was ever charged, which is stranger when you sit with it than if somebody had been. Because the question isn't who did it, it's why a company would put a bounty on the light in your backyard.

[00:00:40]And what [music] were they making out of it? From 1960 to the middle of the 1990s, a chemical company in St. Louis ran a nationwide operation to buy wild fireflies off the American public. Its name was Sigma. And it called its collectors a club. Every summer, Sigma ran ads in papers across some 25 The pitch was simple, catch lightning bugs, mail them in, and get paid, a penny a piece. They mailed you a net with a company name on it and a pin for your collar. You weren't a kid with a jar anymore, you were a firefly scientist. And the kids delivered.

[00:01:17]There's a woman remembered in the lore of this trade only as the lightning bug lady.

[00:01:23]The story goes, she organized 400 children inside a 45-mile radius and shipped 35,000 fireflies to St. Louis every other day for 25 years.

[00:01:37]Supposedly, put her own kids through college on it. And at its peak, the operation took in more than 3 million wild fireflies a year.

[00:01:46]Add up the whole run and the number people land on is around 100 million.

[00:01:52]100 million fireflies caught, killed, dried, and ground into powder. Which really leaves the only question that matters, what does a chemical company do with a hundred million beetles? The answer is inside the lantern. A firefly doesn't glow by magic, it glows by chemistry. A small molecule called luciferin and an enzyme called luciferase meeting in the presence of oxygen. But the reaction has one more requirement. It only fires in the presence of ATP, the molecule that carries energy inside every living cell on Earth.

[00:02:30]Sit with that. A firefly's light is at its root a reaction that needs the fuel of life itself to happen.

[00:02:38]So scientists worked this out in the late 1940s and a chemical company understood what it meant before anyone else. Because if that light only appears when the living fuel is present, then the light is a test. Drop firefly enzyme onto a sample and if it glows, something there is alive. They use it to catch bacteria hiding in food that was supposed to be sterile, in soda that was supposed to be clean, and in cancer research, and in heart research, and in the summer of 1976 they put it on a rocket. When NASA's Viking landers reached down to test the soil of Mars for life, one of the tools they carried ran on the same reaction that lights a firefly's tail.

[00:03:19]We took the signal these insects used to find each other in the dark and we sent it to another planet to ask whether we were alone.

[00:03:26]To make it, we emptied the jars.

[00:03:29]Okay, so let me back up because I did the math on this and it's worse than [music] it sounds. The part that they wanted wasn't the firefly, it was the lantern, >> [music] >> the last segment of the abdomen, which is the light organ. That's the whole harvest. Everything else about the animal is just packaging. So you take a firefly and you take the part of it that actually glows. It's a fraction [music] of a fraction of a gram, which means to fill something this size, you need an inconceivable number of them. Not just a little bit of them. So, each one gave you almost nothing. So, then I wanted the other half. The kids got a penny, that's the buy side. What is it worth coming out the other end? And it turns out you could just buy a vial of this stuff.

[00:04:08]>> [music] >> A small vial of dried lanterns was a catalog item that you could order like a stapler, and it ran a few hundred bucks.

[00:04:14]And the only thing that changed hands in the middle was a bug that used to live in your yard.

[00:04:19]>> [music] >> And that wasn't a crime.

[00:04:21]Anyway. Now, here's the part that should feel like justice and doesn't quite. The harvest didn't end because someone stopped it. No law shut it down, no scandal broke. It ended because the wild firefly became obsolete. [music] Once a scientist learned to copy the gene for luciferase and grow the enzyme in tanks of bacteria, they stopped needing the insect. They stopped needing the kid, the net, and the penny.

[00:04:48]By 1985, synthetic luciferase was for sale. Cheaper, cleaner, identical every single time. And one of the companies that turned that engineered enzyme into a fixture in labs around the world [music] is called Promega. It's headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, about 90 minutes from where I am. So, the map folds in on itself. A company in Missouri spent 35 years buying wild Midwestern light one penny at a time.

[00:05:16]And a company in Wisconsin built the same thing that made buying it pointless. That should be the end, but it isn't. Three threads refuse to close.

[00:05:25]The first, it may not be over. As recently as the summer of 2014, a separate operator in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was still pulling wild fireflies out of the countryside.

[00:05:36][music] Around 40,000 from a single county that year. Now, whether it's still running, the record doesn't say. The second thread is we may have taken things we can't give back. A firefly researcher in Kansas has pointed out that a species once common in the eastern part of the state back in the early '60s simply stopped showing up. No proof it was the harvest, just a gap where a species used to be. The kind of local extinction that leaves nobody and no files to report.

[00:06:04]And the third threat is the one that's the hardest to hold. The enzyme never stopped giving. That same firefly chemistry went on to power sensitive medical tests, including research during the pandemic that could read a result off a single drop of blood. The bug we ground into powder is still, all [music] these decades later, how we ask whether something is alive. And here's what almost nobody tells you about a firefly.

[00:06:26]The glow, the part that we chased, [music] the part that we sold, is the very end of its life, the last couple weeks [music] of it. Before that, for one to three years, it lived underground. A larva in the wet soil and in the leaf litter, hunting slugs in the dark, glowing faintly to no one. Which [music] means the 100 million we ground into powder were only the ones who made it all the way up to the light. And it means something else, something better.

[00:06:51]They're still down there, in yards and in ditches, in the untended corners of every county in the state. The next generation is already in the ground waiting for a summer to come up into.

[00:07:02]And the things that bring them back are almost insultingly small.

[00:07:07]You turn off the porch light. Leave the leaves where they fall. Stop mowing one corner of your yard. Skip the insecticides spray. And the people that do it watch them come back a season or two later. Not thousands, but hundreds, enough to stop you at the window. The light was never really ours to sell, it was borrowed. And the fireflies are still willing to lend it to anyone patient enough to turn off the lights, wait in the dark, and let their kids see a whole field blink back to life.

[00:07:34]>> [crying] >> I hope you found this interesting. If you did, follow along for more, and we'll see you out there.

[00:07:46]>> Real quick, if you're still watching, thank you for being here. And if you want to support what I do, you can do so on Patreon. The information is down below in my description.

[00:07:55]Basically, what I do is I put together uh behind-the-scenes photography and video from every video that I shoot. And I also create what's called a case file, which has all the evidence and sources from my research [music] all bundled together. So, you can check that out as well. You can get that if you are a member on Patreon. So, I hope you follow along in this journey with me, and we'll see you later.