Fireflies Light Up Brooklyn Cemetery Garden
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- Avvah Rossi, director of horticulture at the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, first noticed a spike in fireflies at the Greenway Botanical Garden at the Naval Cemetery about three years ago, with this summer continuing the trend.
- Rossi attributes the fireflies' presence to the initiative's practice of letting native vegetation decompose organically, which produces the rich soil the insects need to survive their two-year underground larval stage.
- Adult fireflies spend their brief airborne life focused on mating and eat very little, occasionally sipping water or plant nectars.
- The Greenway Botanical Garden at the Naval Cemetery is a nearly two-acre green space that still holds about 500 military personnel from the 19th century and features native plantings including tall grasses and wildflower meadows.
- Richard Joyce, a conservation biologist who coordinates the Xerces Society's firefly tracking, said there is no official data on whether urban firefly populations are increasing and that the group depends on volunteers nationwide to document sightings.
Why it matters: The fireflies' return suggests that deliberate, low-intervention soil management in small urban green spaces can support insect life even amid heavy industrial surroundings — yet the Xerces Society's reliance on volunteer data means no one actually knows whether fireflies are gaining or losing ground in U.S. cities.
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