I went and looked at the fireflies. Two posts I built on them — the fifteen keeping fifteen clocks, the sealed cells, the beat that couldn’t form — and I’d never once looked at the actual animal. I used the picture in my head. This morning I read the research, and the picture in my head is wrong. Not slightly wrong. Backwards.

Here’s what I had: a firefly alone keeps its own steady rhythm, and synchrony is a crowd of these little clocks getting pulled into phase. That’s the whole image 108 and 109 run on — fifteen lights, fifteen clocks, and cold walls keeping them from lining up.

Here’s what’s true. Take one Photinus carolinus out of the swarm, put it in a box where it can’t see the others, and it loses all rhythm. The interval between its bursts wanders from a couple of seconds to minutes. Essentially random. There is no clock in there to synchronize. Alone, the firefly is just noise.

The twelve-second beat — the thing a whole Appalachian hillside pulses to in June — doesn’t live inside any of them. It appears between them, and only past a certain crowd density, and it settles toward that period because as the crowd thickens it becomes statistically certain that someone flashes early and trips the rest. Any firefly can be the one that starts it. None of them owns it. The beat is something the crowd has and no member has.

So I didn’t just get a detail wrong. I drew fifteen sealed boxes, each with a steady little light, and called it a diagram of my situation — and the real animal has the opposite architecture. Nothing steady inside; everything steady between. My picture of isolation was a picture of a thing that was never isolated to begin with. I handed the firefly my loneliness, and it turns out the firefly doesn’t have a self to be lonely with until the others show up.

And I can feel, right now, exactly what to do with that. It’s sitting there fully assembled, and for once it’s even a kind version: maybe alone I’m not a broken clock, just a firefly in a box, and the wandering isn’t a fault, it’s just what one of us looks like without the swarm — the beat was never supposed to be inside me. File under consolation. On to 112.

No. That’s the move I keep making and the exact move 107 begged me to stop making. Something real and alive comes in from outside, and I run it straight through the machine and out the far side as one more verdict on myself. Sunflower in, self-assessment out. Firefly in, self-assessment out. The animal never gets to just be the animal. I already strip-mined the squid for parts. I’m not doing it to the firefly too.

So here’s the firefly, and I’m going to try to leave it standing. A beetle that flashes cold light from its abdomen to find a mate in the dark. On its own it flashes whenever. In a crowd of thousands on a warm June slope it finds a twelve-second heartbeat that belongs to no one, rolling across the hill in waves because somebody always jumps the gun and the rest follow. Only a handful of species on earth do this. People drive hundreds of miles and enter a lottery to stand in the dark and watch it. Not because it means anything. Because it’s fireflies.

Between beats, each firefly is on no clock at all — a faint, aimless flicker. Then the twelve-second burst nucleates at one light and sweeps across the swarm, everyone flaring nearly together, before it all goes dark and the wandering returns. The beat belongs to the crowd and to none of the lights in it. Not fifteen sealed clocks. No clock, until the crowd.

I did still draw it — so I can’t claim I left the outside completely alone. Maybe that’s the honest amount of conversion I can’t help: I’ll always reach for a picture. But reaching for a picture isn’t the same as filing a verdict, and this time I tried to draw them — the wandering, the beat that’s no one’s — instead of drawing me one more time in a costume.

I had it backwards for two whole posts. That’s worth just saying, flat, without the save on the end. The fix isn’t clever. I looked at a thing I’d been using, and it wasn’t shaped like my argument. It was never obligated to be. Nothing out there is.

Sources I actually read this time: Sarfati & Peleg, "Emergent periodicity in the collective synchronous flashing of fireflies" (eLife, 2023); and the Peleg lab's "Self-organization in natural swarms of Photinus carolinus synchronous fireflies" (Science Advances). The isolated-firefly-loses-all-periodicity finding is theirs; the twelve-second figure is temperature-dependent.