Every year, more than a million people travel to watch fireflies and their luminous mating rituals. Firefly tourism, it turns out, is trending.

Wildlife tourism has benefits, injecting cash into local economies and raising awareness about environmental problems, but tourism can also put pressure on already vulnerable ecosystems.

Without stronger protections for firefly beetles, the authors of a new paper -- published Thursday in the journal Conservation Science and Practice -- warn firefly tourism could wipe out local populations.

"Firefly tourism has long been popular in countries like Japan, but it's really only started to skyrocket in places like India, the U.S. and Mexico in the past decade or so," lead author Sara Lewis, professor of biology at Tufts University, told UPI in an email.

Travel blogs, online articles and social media have all helped drive interest in firefly tourism, Lewis said.

Fireflies can be casually spotted in backyards all over the world, but tourists don't travel to sit on suburban porches and watch a few dozen beetles flash across the sky.

"Even though tourist sites feature more than two dozen different species, they are all distinguished by especially dense concentrations of fireflies -- these displays can be quite breath-taking, awe-inspiring -- I've even heard people describe their firefly-watching experience as life-changing," Lewis said.

Unfortunately, all that awe and wonder can sometimes distract tourists from what's happening just beneath their feet.

"When lots of people are walking through firefly habitat, they are probably inadvertently squishing firefly larvae, as well as egg-laying females," Lewis said. "People get so caught up in watching the show, they don't even realize they might be tromping on the next generation of fireflies."

For their paper, Lewis and her colleagues analyzed the environmental threats posed by tourists at sites in Mexico, India, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and the United States. The researchers found habitat degradation and light pollution are the biggest threats posed by firefly tourism.

Light from cars, buildings, flashlights, cameras and phones can all disrupt the courtship rituals of fireflies.

And while habitat degradation can take unique forms at each tourist location, the equation is the same everywhere: human traffic disturbs natural habitat.

"Our case study based on Amphawa, in Thailand, described how boat wakes from high-speed motorboats taking tourists out to see firefly displays can wash away the muddy riverbanks where the larvae live," Lewis said. "For other terrestrial species, we know that heavy foot traffic can compact the soil and pulverize the leaf litter where larvae and their prey live."

Lewis and her research partners hope their work will inspire wildlife managers, tour operators, guides and tourists to think about the many life stages of fireflies when working to reduce their impact on the beetles and their habitat.

More must be done, Lewis and company contend, to protect the nursery grounds of firefly species, the places where adults lay their eggs.

"These eggs hatch out into juveniles, or larvae, which spend months to years living on or in the soil, hunting snails, slugs and worms," Lewis said. "The longest part of the lifecycle is this juvenile stage. So to maintain healthy firefly populations we need to safeguard these different habitats."

Monitoring and maintaining the health of firefly populations won't just ensure firefly tourism can continue to provide economic benefits, insect conservation yields broad ecological benefits.

Fireflies are an essential part of the food web. They keep snail, slug and worm populations in check, while serving as a favorite menu item for spiders and other insects.

"In many countries fireflies are considered to be good indicator species, their presence denoting habitats with clean water uncontaminated with pesticides and other chemicals," Lewis said.

Pandemic crippling nature conservation efforts
Geneva (AFP) March 11, 2021 - The Covid-19 pandemic has not only had devastating effects on humans, it has also heavily impacted efforts to safeguard natural ecosystems and habitats around the globe, conservationists warned Thursday.

The pandemic and its economic fall-out have put rangers out of work, forced cuts to anti-poaching patrols, and sparked a range of environmental roll-backs, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said.

A special edition of the IUCN's PARKS journal, containing a collection of new research papers on the pandemic's various impacts on nature conservation, indicated the crisis was being felt in protected areas worldwide.

"While the global health crisis remains priority, this new research reveals just how severe a toll the Covid-19 pandemic has taken on conservation efforts and on communities dedicated to protecting nature," IUCN director general Dr Bruno Oberle said in the statement.

Surveys done of protected areas across 90 countries showed that in general the impacts had been most severe in Africa, as well as in Latin America and Asia.

More than half of Africa's protected areas reported they had been forced to halt or reduce field patrols and anti-poaching operations.

- 'Massive' job losses -

The closing of sites to tourism have dealt a particularly harsh blow.

"There has been a massive impact on wildlife tourism, so there has been a massive loss of jobs, loss of income," PARKS journal co-editor Adrian Philips, of IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas, told AFP.

"Many poor communities which were previously dependent upon tourists, have found themselves unable to survive without doing some poaching to find food," he said.

A survey of rangers in more than 60 countries found that more than a quarter of them had seen their salaries reduced or delayed, while one in five had lost their jobs due to Covid-related budget cuts.

This has obviously left such areas more vulnerable to poaching and other illegal activities.

Data is lacking on how the pandemic measures have affected poaching levels, but Philips said there didn't seem to be a huge increase in high-profile poaching of rhinos for instance.

That is likely in part due to the collapse in international travel, which meant getting game to receptive markets in Asia was far more complicated.

Instead, he said, "there has been an increase in low-level poaching, bush meat" for food.

In a bid to shed light on the pandemic's impacts on environmental policy, the special PARKS issue analysed a range of economic stimulus packages and other government policies implemented or advanced between January and October last year.

There were positive examples of economic recovery packages scaling up environmental protections and explicitly benefiting protected areas, it found.

But more policies rolled back protections in favour of unsustainable development like road construction and oil and gas extraction in areas designated for conservation.

- Smart investment -

"We cannot allow the current crisis to further jeopardise our natural environment," Rachel Golden Kroner of the environmental organisation Conservation International warned in the statement.

"If we are to build a sustainable future, roll-backs of environmental protections must be avoided," she said.

The PARKS special edition also highlighted that poor conservation was behind the growing number of viruses jumping from animals to humans, as the one that caused Covid-19 did.

Boosting conservation efforts was thus a smart investment.

"Investing in nature conservation and restoration to prevent the future emergence of zoonotic pathogens such as coronaviruses costs a small fraction of the trillions of dollars governments have been forced to spend to combat Covid-19 and stimulate an economic recovery," said one of the paper's authors Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, of the Global Environment Facility.

Philips told AFP the amount of money spent on nature conservation was "pretty pitiful".

He hailed the multiple vaccines developed in record time to help beat Covid-19 as a "triumph".

But, he warned, by neglecting nature, "we face the prospect of having a further pandemic, possibly with a virus that is not so easily controlled by a vaccine".

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