If colors are magic, then fireflies would transport messages. Why not, I thought? But how to measure when it's so darned hard to catch enough bugs to test my theory.
I decided to experiment with flashing colors into tanks of fireflies I'd paid little kids to catch. They had a wonderful time running around with the jars I'd given them, and the only cost to me was a few rainbow lollipops.
I must have a hundred: no, maybe only seventy. Fifty? Never mind. It was enough because it was all I had.
I set up photography reflectors, one on each side of the rectangular tank. Turned off the annoying overhead lights, then with a color wheel attached to my flashlight, began the experiment.
Red, no matter how dark or how faded, caused great agitation. The "flies" dashed and dated about, bouncing off the glass walls of the tank, careening into each other, even tearing off the wings of some. So I turned off the light.
Waited a good ten minutes.
Blue kept them calm lethargic almost. They'd fly about in slow zigzags, eyes half-open.
Yellow sent them to the top of the tank, clinging to the mesh lid and swaying their heads back and forth, back and forth as if drugged.
Green sent them off, looking up and down, up and down. I couldn't decipher why until it came to me they were looking for food.
After that I played with color combinations. I shot bursts of light into the tank, using the Morse code. Imagine my surprise when the fireflies clustered close to the light source and began rhythmically blinking their eyes.
I wrote down the letters, or what I thought were letters. It wasn't a language I knew, so I called in the School of Languages. Five professors showed up, looked at my recordings, watched the bugs, and argued. Was it Spanish? No. French? No. A form of ancient Egyptian? Still no.
Oh, the argument that ensued! All those experts yammering at each other, determined to prove the others wrong!
I shooed them away, filled out a grant request to create a language lab that only I would run. It was quickly approved: this was a novel idea! Something no one had ever explored before.
Applications came in. I hired two, a young man with knowledge of six Latin-based languages, and a teen from Illinois who was fluent in four Middle-Eastern tongues.
The students divided the fireflies into separate tanks. (This was a fresh supply as the durned bugs don't live that long!)
Each student flashed in alphabets from a language. Waited. The bugs responded with the blinking of eyes and the flapping of wings.
Within a week, both students and bugs had mastered a form of communication that was part of this language and part of that.
Newly hatched fireflies knew the language so well, that we decided to release the more advanced ones into the university's forest. We set up observation stations, night-vision cameras, sent up drones and attached homing boxes high up in the trees, on the tops of buildings.
Imagine how pleased I was when more and more of the bugs seemed to be communicating! Not just with each other, but with us!
I saw myself winning a Nobel Prize, writing an award-winning scientific study, jumping to professor status seemingly overnight!
Not content to stick with the whiteish light from our flashlights, we experiment with colors. Yellow made them land on branches. Purple seemed to put them to sleep (we had to stop right away when bats swept in and began eating our students!)
Red. I didn't want to use red, but the boy, he disobeyed just to see what would happen.
An all-out war began. Bug eating bug, tearing off wings and legs. Biting off heads.
The boy thought it was great fun and wouldn't stop until I tore the light from his hand.
By that time, not one bug was alive.
All that research wasted. My Prize and tenure gone.
Oh, well, I thought.
What would happen if I worked with cougars instead?
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