Fireflies in the Philippines

What the records actually say

Everything above is counted from this site's own archive, which is open data anyone can download and check. The figure worth stopping on is the research-grade one.

Research grade is iNaturalist's term for an observation that at least two people have independently identified to the same species. It is a good standard and this site uses it for the verified badge on the map. It is also, for Philippine fireflies, almost unreachable: there is rarely a second person available who can name the animal in the photograph.

So the records are not poor. Most of them carry a photograph and exact coordinates, taken by someone who went out at night and bothered. What is missing is not effort. It is the expert on the other end.

What happens when nobody local is checking

A gap in identification does not stay neutral. It fills with guesses, and the guesses come from wherever the reference material is thickest, which is North America and Europe.

Some of the Philippine records in this archive carry the common names of fireflies from other continents: a Blue Ghost, which is an Appalachian animal, and a Portuguese firefly. They were entered in good faith by people trying to be helpful. Nobody was there to say otherwise, so the names stayed. That is the quiet cost of a data gap, and it is why counting the gap is worth doing.

Why importing more will not fix it

This site adds records every night by reading openly licensed observations from iNaturalist, and it works: the archive grows by hundreds of records a day. The Philippine number does not move.

It cannot. A one-off import already took everything iNaturalist holds for the country, including the records that will never reach research grade. The nightly job is a mirror, and a mirror cannot show something that was never in front of it.

The only thing that adds a Philippine record is a person in the Philippines writing one down.

What actually helps

Log what you see, even if you cannot name it. An unidentified sighting with a date, a place and an honest note about the flash is a real record, and it is the kind this country has least of. Naming the species is not the useful part; being there is.

Note the things that are easy to forget by morning: the colour of the light, whether it flashed or glowed steadily, roughly how many, what the ground was like, and the time. The guide to reading a flash explains why each of those matters.

If you organise anything, a walk with a school or a barangay, the field kit on this site is free and needs no permission from us. And if you know a firefly festival or a guided walk we have missed, send it in.

A note on where this leads

Nothing on this page is an appeal for money and none of it needs an account. The whole archive stays open under a licence that lets anyone use it, including the researchers who might one day put real names on these records.

If enough places here pass a handful of records each, they earn their own pages, with a month-by-month picture of when fireflies have been seen and a list of what has been logged. Almost nowhere in the Philippines has reached that yet. There is no reason for it to stay that way.

The names our records carry

These are the species names attached to Philippine records so far, and how many records carry each. It is a list of what has been written down, not a list of what lives here.

• Pteroptyx macdermotti6 records
• Abscondita anceyi4 records
• Vesta impressicollis3 records
• Pteroptyx maipo1 records

What has been logged here

Where to start

• Log a sighting, named or not
• Learn to read a flash
• Run a firefly walk
• Festivals and guided walks
• Download the whole archive