About Alitaptap

Why fireflies, and why a map

Fireflies are disappearing quietly. They are hurt by the three things that spread fastest around a growing city: light at night, tidied-up land, and insecticide. And because they are small, seasonal and active only after dark, their decline is very hard to notice. A place can lose them completely and nobody writes it down.

A map is the cheapest way to write it down. One person who sees a firefly in a field behind their house has an anecdote; a thousand such observations, each with a date and a location, become a record that can be compared year to year and argued from. That is the entire idea here.

The name is Filipino. Alitaptap is the Filipino word for fireflies or lightning bugs, and the Philippines is where this project started — a country whose mangrove fireflies are among the most spectacular in the world and among the least documented.

One insect, many names. Across much of the United States they are lightning bugs; in Britain and much of Europe the wingless females are glow-worms. They are all beetles in the family Lampyridae, and this site treats the words as the same thing — search for any of them and you will find the same map.

Where the records come from

Every sighting on the map comes from one of two places, and the map says which:

• Community reports — someone saw a firefly and logged it here. These are held for human review before they appear publicly, so the map is not a place to post whatever you like.
• Research-grade observations from iNaturalist, a long-established biodiversity platform. These have been identified and confirmed by other naturalists, and each one links back to the original record so you can check it yourself.

What we deliberately do not map

iNaturalist randomises the coordinates of observations whose location is obscured or private, roughly one research-grade firefly record in eleven with a reported accuracy of about 28 kilometres, while still returning a coordinate that looks perfectly ordinary. Mapping those would put pins in the wrong valley and give no sign of it.

So we ask the API only for open locations and then re-check every record individually before it is mapped, because a query parameter can be quietly renamed and that kind of failure is invisible. Records that fail the check are not shown. We would rather have a smaller map than a confidently wrong one.

Identification, without pretending

The guided flash ID walks through four questions (flash pattern, colour, habitat, region) and narrows down which species you are likely to have seen. It is ordinary logic, not a model: the same answers always give the same result, and you can read why each species was suggested.

It can also tell you that it does not know. "Unsure" is an option on every question and is not counted against anything, and a set of answers the guide cannot place returns nothing rather than a confident guess. An unidentified sighting with an honest date and location is worth more to this project than a wrong species name.

The data is yours too

The sightings collected here are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence and can be downloaded in full, as GeoJSON or CSV, from /api/sightings. No account, no request, no scraping the map.

This is the part that makes the project worth doing rather than just nice to look at. A dataset that cannot be obtained cannot be used by a researcher, a local conservation group, or a student, and a licence nobody can act on is decoration.

Two requests, and they are requests rather than conditions. The licence has already given you the right to take this data, republish it and build on it, and we are not going to add terms on top of that. But the export is cached for several hours, so please keep a copy rather than fetching it in a loop. It is a volunteer project on a small budget. And if you are pulling it regularly, or you have built something with it, we would genuinely like to hear about it: write to us on the contact page. Knowing the data is used is most of what keeps it maintained.

Featured on SciStarter

Alitaptap is featured on SciStarter, a directory of citizen-science projects run by the non-profit SciStarter Foundation. It is where people go to find real research they can join as volunteers, from studying space telescope images to keeping storm drains clear, and now mapping fireflies. SciStarter lists our goal in one line that we could not have put better: map where fireflies still glow, and where they have stopped.

• Alitaptap on SciStarter →
• SciStarter's Featured Projects →

Who writes the stories

The firefly stories are published under the name Voyeojer24. It is a pen name, not a person's legal name, and saying so here seems better than letting anyone assume otherwise, but there is a real editor behind it, and the same one every time.

Here is how a story is actually made, because it matters more than the name on it. A first draft is written with the help of an AI model, grounded in this project's own approved sightings, live iNaturalist observations, and a topic angle picked to avoid repeating what has already been published. The model is not allowed to invent statistics, quotations or links, and everything it is given to work from is real data from this site.

Nothing reaches the site from that step alone. Every draft sits unpublished until a person opens it, reads it, and approves it, and drafts do get rejected. The photographs are chosen and licence-checked separately, and the credit under each one names the photographer and links to the original. The byline is the editor standing behind that review, which is the part a reader is entitled to know about.

Every article says this at the foot of the page too. If you find something in one that is wrong, the contact page is the fastest way to tell us, and it will be fixed.

Who runs it

Alitaptap is an independent project, built and run by one person after work, not a company or an institution. It is funded by whatever the donation links bring in and by a small number of sponsors, and it costs very little to run because it is deliberately built to be cheap: static pages, one small database, and public APIs.

If something here is wrong, whether a misidentified species, a pin in the wrong place, or a claim that does not hold up, please say so. The contact page is the fastest route. Every message is read, and corrections are what I act on fastest.