![]() ![]() The park also has an option for large groups (up to 24 guests) in their large vehicle pass that you can apply for in the lottery as well. If you’re one of the lucky lottery winners, our best advice is to share the experience with family and friends, meet a few new friends on the way, and, when the show starts, just sit back, relax, and take in the magic. We spoke with many steadfast lottery applicants who waited more than five years to be selected. The park service staff is good about giving you advance notice of what to bring and how to prepare for the night. When the day of your pass arrives, you pull into the park’s Sugarlands Visitor Center before 7 p.m. Costs are minimal: $2.00 per shuttle passenger and a $20 reservation fee. Lottery winners and their scheduled view dates are announced during the second week of May. Each parking pass is good for one vehicle with up to six firefly enthusiasts. The park receives close to 30,000 lottery applications for the coveted 1,800 parking passes. One of note is a deadly copycat species that mimics the synchronous firefly’s flashes to lure in a mate, only to consume them.Įvery year, around late April, the National Park Service announces the dates for the lottery to view the synchronous firefly event. Scattered throughout this display, you’ll also get glimpses of the 18 other firefly species located within the park. The females stay on or close to the ground during this display, responding with a quick double flash as a response to the males. In near darkness, with no light pollution, you can see them in masses through the distance, weaving and flying to their own music. Throughout the woods and across the park, from a height ranging from two feet off the ground to 10 feet above the forest floor, these fireflies spread out, twinkling like moving strands of Christmas lights, threaded through the trees, brush, and even over rivers and ponds. This pattern repeats all through the dusk and early night hours. The males time or synchronize their flashes together as a mass, all going off together for a few twinkling seconds, then all going dark for a few moments. Instead of the random, flash-at-will pattern common in most all other firefly species, the male Photinus carolinus has been flash-mobbing potential girlfriends for thousands of years. It’s this lighting pattern that makes the fireflies at the event so famous and so unique. When the mating season arrives, the males of these tiny, flying fireflies, sometimes regionally known as lightning bugs, light up or “flash” their abdomens at females to attract a mate. The National Park Rangers and their entomologists begin predicting the mating window by studying the temperature, weather, and rainfall in order to plan the event’s timing and lottery. ![]() Because of these efforts, the annual Synchronous Firefly Event in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has continued to grow in popularity since the 1990s.įor two weeks in late May to early June, the mating season for the Photinus carolinus, America’s only species of firefly capable of a synchronized lighting display, is the star attraction. Over time, the National Park Service saw the need to balance people’s desire to view this phenomenon against the need to protect and conserve the fireflies and their habitat. Once word spread, individuals began making their way to the park to see the light show for themselves. While well-known to the local population of the Elkmont and Gatlinburg Tennessee area for decades, it wasn’t until the 1950’s that the mating ritual of these rover fireflies caught the attention of entomologists and naturalists. ![]() For the second year in a row, members of the pest management industry got a first-row seat to the Synchronous Firefly Event in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Or, that’s what some of our young, future entomologists thought when they witnessed a truly spectacular display put on by Mother Nature this June. Smokey the Bear make room for Sparky the Firefly. Synchronous Fireflies Event in the Great Smoky Mountains ![]()
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