Hello, friends, and welcome to episode 191 of Just the Zoo of Us.

This week, I'm joined by a biology professor and researcher, Dr. Sarah Lauer, to review nature's very own glimmering fairy lights, fireflies.

We talked about how to do the beetle dance, tips for packing a bioluminescent picnic, and the shockingly diabolical

world of fireflies. There's friendly fire, catfishing, thievery, and snail shakes. So turn off

your lights and enjoy the show as the night sky comes to life. Just the Zoo of Us presents

fireflies with Dr. Sarah Lauer. Hello, friends, this is Ellen Weatherford.

I'm here with Just the Zoo of Us, your favorite

animal review podcast. And this week, I am really excited to be bringing a glimmering, glistening,

beautiful animal friend. I'm so excited to talk about this animal. But before we do, I'd like to say

hi to our friend Sarah

Lauer. Say hi, Sarah. Hello, everyone. Thanks so much for inviting me to be here today. Thank you for

joining me. I'm really excited about this. Before we get started, first of all, what are your pronouns?

My pronouns are she and her. Thank you so much. And I'm excited to talk about this little bug. People maybe like have a little bit of hesitancy to get excited about bugs, but I feel like this is an extremely charismatic bug that people can get really excited about. You know what I mean?

We call it the gateway insect.

Oh, for sure. This is definitely one that is like, oh, but you like fireflies. So maybe they got an Owl City song and everything. There's like definitely some stepping stones. So that makes me curious. What got you into working with fireflies? So I've been working on fireflies for the past 13 years. Wow. Yeah. And I first got into them when I was in

graduate school. In my graduate program, we had something called rotations where you spend

six weeks in three different labs across the university. And in each of those labs, you do a little mini project and see which one you want to pick

when you want to do graduate study.

And one of my rotations was to read about fireflies.

And I found it fascinating that this critter that we go out and, you know, we know in love from

childhood, go out and catch them, put them in a jar, you know. They're so familiar, but we

know so little about them. And so I was just fascinated by the mystery and curious and just in

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