Glowworms on a New Zealand night
The beloved glowworm has gotten a glow-up thanks to pro bono work by local conservationists.
Local wildlife enthusiast Peter Cooper collects and breeds glowworms in his spare time in a garden shed before releasing their larvae into a reserve in North Yorkshire where they haven’t been seen in 100 years.
An insect described as looking like “lamps lit by the hands of fairy folk,” the reserve’s manager credited Cooper’s “raw passion and enthusiasm” for relighting these fairy lamps after so long an absence.
Nosterfield Nature Reserve is described as “one of North Yorkshire’s most important wetland wildlife sites.”
It stretches around 600 acres across old limestone quarries that were sometimes naturally reclaimed and sometimes rewilded by the nonprofit Lower Ure Conservation Trust into a special habitat ideal for members of the Lampyridae family of bioluminescent insects.
Described by the poet Edmund Bogg as appearing like “lamps lit by the hands of fairy folk,” the family contains the animals we call fireflies, lightning bugs, and glowworms.
The Guardian described them as having once been abundant across Britain. They’ve since gone dark across wide swaths of the island, and are extremely difficult to re-establish.
Yet Cooper and other dedicated volunteers referred to as “glow-getters” have slowly built an expertise in the delicate art of rearing larvae in captivity, which they’re now leveraging to brighten the Yorkshire weald.
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“They are incredibly rare in the region and I can’t tell you how excited the volunteers have been about it,” Simon Warwick, manager of the Nosterfield reserve, told the Guardian.
Cooper has counted 1,900 larvae in his shed that are due for release at Nosterfield this year—part of an ongoing process that he says can’t be confirmed as successful until the wild-bred offspring of these shed larvae reach maturity and shine their own lights in the Yorkshire darkness sometime in 2030.
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