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Flights of Fancy A warm, pleasant evening is falling upon the lawn. Uprising luminous fairies, each one flashing its message to the world, and hopefully to others of its kind of the opposite gender; slowly drifting upwards and across the lawns with the breeze as the evening light fades into night’s darkness. The children run after the floating lights to capture them, temporarily, in their glass jars to watch the little flashing creatures climb about on the blades of grass inserted into the jars and blink its little message, “Here I am, pick me”, to the others like them. The free flyers, floating among the night-lights from stars and porch lights alike flash back, “Here I am, come find me”. The children, of all ages from one to100, gaze in wonder at the floating, rising, flashing lights of the fireflies as the messages are blinked back and forth like insect Morse code. A Russian chemist and researcher, Natalia Nikolaevna Ugarova, states in the journal Nature Photonics, that “…chemical reaction that produces the enchanting light that these insects are famous for — is useful not only for biological research but also in photonics, where it serves as an ideal model of a photo-emitter system. In fact, it is one of the most intensively studied bioluminescence systems and is now widely applied in biotechnology for gene-expression reporting, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) sensing and DNA sequencing.” As if that explains the magic of the lights lifting from among the blades of lawn and rising towards the sky like angels heading home after a long day of being guardians. Ugarova further explains that “Luciferase is a common bioluminescent enzyme found in the firefly Photinus pyralis. It catalyzes the oxidation of firefly Luciferin in the presence of magnesium ions and adenosine-5’- triphosphate. The product of this reaction, Oxyluciferin, is in a singlet electronically excited state and has been proved to be the bioluminescent emitter of visible light.” I wonder if that is what attracts the amazed attention of the children around the world to these Photinus pyralis as they emit their oxidized Luciferin in a bioluminescent blaze of natural light. Perhaps it is the result of all of those chemical reactions that are the attention grabbers: insect lightning. I suppose that would explain the “Why and How” of the bug lights, but it does not explain the fascination these fairy lights invoke among we children as the words from the poem “Ode to a Lightning Bug” by Susan Prospere so aptly says, “…over the rose bushes, the lightning bugs open their topcoats to fly, and their hearts enamored with the night, light small temptations in the minds of the children.” The colors of the night flying insect’s lights are a result of the sequence of the amino acid created Luciferin, the chemical reaction of which is identical in all species of luminescent flies and beetles, and appears not to influence the coloration of the illumination of the fairy-like insects (Ugarova, 8.) What child so fortunate as to view the flight of these enchanting lights has not exclaimed to their friends “Why, look! Those insects are emitting a bioluminescent glow caused by the reaction of the enzyme luciferase catalyzing the oxidation of Luciferin in the presence of Magnesium ions and adenosine-5-triphosphate which when combined creates Oxyluciferin which has been proven to be the cause of the emission of the bioluminescent light!” (Ugarova, 8.) I prefer to think, as did Prospere in the poem “Ode to a Lightning Bug”, that the fascination of holding a burning ember of insect in their hands without harming either their hands or the insect was the actual attractant for the children, me included. Why, though, the different coloration of lights from the same kind of insects? Ugarova explained that by analyzing the bioluminescent spectra {the light} using Gaussian curve fitting “…the whole spectra can be decomposed into three components peaking at around…the first two peaks coincide with the well- known values of green-yellow and red bioluminescence maxima, where-as the weak peak, at 670 nm was observed for the first time and…” (Ugarova 8) Blablablabla. Meanwhile the children “who, in turn, move erratically over lawns, clasping captured lightning bugs in their hands…” (Prospere, 401), do not really care why the colors are different, only that they are so. The fact that the light of the lightning bugs are caused by chemical reaction and enzymatic action is important to science and researchers, who were children at one time as well, is evident in the many years and dollars and people involved in the research. I wonder, though, if given the option children would prefer to analyze the bioluminescent spectra using Gaussian curve fitting and determine that the spectra is composed of three components ( Ugarova 8), or if they would prefer “ clasping captured lightning bugs in their cupped hands until the night is filled with the lit cathedrals of the children’s hands” while one child, named Amy, “luminous in her own light...wonders aloud if all plans are haphazard, because all of us imagine connections in our heads, joining together these pinpoints of light, dot by dot, as we name constellations” ( Prospere 401.) I, for one, prefer counting stars and fireflies. Works cited Nikolaevna Ugarova, Natalia. "Bioluminescence: Fireflies Revisited." Nature Photonics 2.1 (2008): 8-9. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 Mar. 2014. Prospere, Susan. American Scholar. Spring86, Vol. 55 Issue 3, p401. 2p, Database: Academic Search Complete. 15 March 2014 |