There was something magical about a power cut during the monsoon when I was growing up.
Once the lights inside the house went out, we would often wander outside. The darkness did not feel empty. Fireflies flickered among the bushes, along streams and over the edges of rice fields. Sometimes there seemed to be hundreds of them, blinking on and off without any obvious rhythm.
You did not need to know anything about ecology to be fascinated by them.
For many Nepalis who grew up before the rapid spread of concrete and artificial lighting, fireflies are part of that childhood landscape. They were simply there.
But I wonder how many children growing up in Nepal today will have the same memory.
The places where fireflies once appeared are changing quickly. Fields are being built over. Streams are being narrowed or polluted. Bright LED lights have replaced much of the darkness around homes, roads and public spaces.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, the fireflies are becoming harder to find.
We have become very good at noticing the disappearance of large animals. Nepal rightly celebrates the recovery of tigers and greater one-horned rhinos. These are remarkable conservation achievements, and they deserve the attention they receive.
But conservation is not only about animals large enough to appear on a wildlife poster.
There is an entire world of insects around us that we know surprisingly little about. Fireflies are one small part of that world, and their decline should make us pause.
We barely know what we have
One of the problems is that we do not have a good picture of Nepal’s fireflies to begin with.
There are roughly 2,200 described firefly species around the world, but Nepal’s own diversity remains poorly documented. Historical records go back to the 1830s, yet only a small number of species have been formally recorded in the country.
Even basic identification can be a problem. Local reports have at times identified Nepalese fireflies as Luciola cruciata, a species associated with Japan. Errors like these may sound minor, but they point to a larger problem. If we cannot reliably identify the species living here, it becomes much harder to know where they occur, how their populations are changing or what is causing those changes.
That matters because fireflies are not particularly resilient creatures.
Their lives begin on the ground. Firefly larvae can spend months or even years in soil, leaf litter and damp places, where they hunt small organisms and pests. They depend on the kind of moist, relatively undisturbed environment that is becoming increasingly difficult to find.
Pesticides add another pressure.
Agricultural chemicals are widely used across Nepal, and their effects do not necessarily stop at the crop they are intended to protect. Chemicals that enter soil and water can affect organisms that were never the target.
For a firefly larva living in that soil, the consequences can be serious.
Then, once the firefly finally reaches adulthood, there is another problem waiting above the ground.
Light.
When the night is no longer dark
Fireflies use their flashes to communicate, including to find mates. That simple exchange becomes much harder when the surrounding environment is flooded with artificial light.
Streetlights. Vehicle headlights. Buildings that remain brightly lit through the night.
All of them change the darkness that fireflies evolved to navigate.
It is easy to think of light pollution as a problem for astronomers who can no longer see the stars. But artificial light changes the behaviour of living organisms too.
And fireflies are particularly vulnerable because their entire courtship depends on being able to see one another.
This is becoming an increasingly important question for Nepal as places that still have fireflies begin to attract visitors.
Pokhara is one example. Firefly-watching has been promoted around areas near Phewa Lake as a form of night-time tourism. There is obvious appeal in it. People are willing to travel to see something that has become increasingly rare.
But that creates a strange contradiction.
The more successful firefly tourism becomes, the greater the pressure on the places where fireflies live.
Visitors walking along stream edges and lakeshores can disturb vegetation and soil where larvae live. Flashlights and cameras can disrupt the darkness. More buildings and decorative lighting can make the habitat less suitable in the first place.
If fireflies are going to become a tourism attraction, their habitat cannot simply be treated as a backdrop.
The fireflies have to come first.
A blind spot in conservation
There is also a bigger question here about how we think about conservation in Nepal.
Our laws have historically been designed around the animals we can easily see and name. The National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act, 1973, for example, was built around specific groups of protected wildlife, with its schedules focusing on mammals, birds and reptiles.
Insects are largely absent from that framework.
That does not mean Nepal has no laws that can protect them. Environmental and pesticide legislation provides tools that could help. The Environment Protection Act, 2019, for example, provides a broader framework for environmental protection, while the Pesticides Management Act, 2019 and Pesticide Management Regulations, 2024 provide mechanisms for regulating agricultural chemicals.
The problem is often less about having a law on paper than about what happens afterwards.
A stream can be important habitat for countless small organisms, but if its edges are steadily built over, lit up and polluted, the damage is not necessarily going to make headlines.
A rhino disappearing from a national park would rightly trigger an alarm. A population of insects disappearing from a wetland may not even be noticed. That is partly because we have not done enough work to find out what is there.
Start by looking
There is no single solution to the disappearance of fireflies.
But the first step should be surprisingly simple.
We need to start looking.
Universities and researchers could work together to document the firefly species found across Nepal and establish where populations remain. Citizen-science projects could allow people to record sightings using their phones. Such projects would not replace scientific research, but they could help researchers understand where fireflies are still being seen and where they are disappearing.
There are also practical things communities can do.
If firefly-watching becomes part of local tourism, visitor numbers should be controlled. Flashlights and flash photography should be restricted. Important breeding areas should be protected from people walking through them. And unnecessary lighting around known habitats should be reduced.
Farmers and local authorities also have a role to play in reducing the unnecessary use of pesticides and protecting streams, wetlands and other damp habitats.
None of this is as dramatic as counting tigers.
There is no single photograph of a firefly that will generate the same excitement as a tiger emerging from the forest.
But perhaps that is precisely why they are easy to overlook.
A firefly does not announce that an ecosystem is changing. It simply stops appearing.
One summer there are fewer of them. Then fewer again. Eventually, a child grows up without ever seeing the night filled with those tiny flashes.
By then, we may realise that we have lost much more than a childhood memory.
Fireflies are part of the ecosystems around us. Their lives depend on clean water, healthy soil, vegetation and darkness. When they disappear, they may be telling us something about the condition of those environments too.
Perhaps the next time we talk about Nepal’s conservation success, we should look beyond the animals that make the biggest headlines.
And perhaps, on a warm monsoon evening, we should turn off a few lights, step outside and look carefully.
There may be a world disappearing in the darkness that we have not yet learned to notice.
