The Pianeta Lab – in collaboration with the Public Science Lab – recently launched a new project: ‘Fireflies and Cicadas: Stories of Encounters Between City and Nature‘. Whilst the project has only officially launched within Modena (Italy) and the surrounding areas, it is open to contributions from anywhere via an online platform (currently available in Italian and English): https://pianeta-lab-storia.vercel.app/
For more on this in the context of Modena, and on the Pianeta Lab generally, see the fireflies and cicada project page on the Pianeta Lab website: https://www.pianeta.org/tra-lucciole-e-cicale-storie-di-incontri-tra-citta-e-natura/
About the Project:
We invite people to contribute stories about interactions they’ve had with cicadas and fireflies, well-known for their iconic sensory features (buzzing and glowing) but perhaps sometimes ignored or taken for granted.
The project aims to experiment with qualitative approaches to understanding human-biodiversity relationships. Biodiversity and environmental assessments often rely on numbers: plants, animals, and insects are counted; air quality is quantified; data is transformed into and presented as graphs. This is valuable information, but it does not always reflect the experience of those who interact with these environments. To give voice to these experiences, we invite you to record your stories, via photos, drawings, texts and recordings. As a starting point, we ask you to think about your encounters with an insect as humble as it is magical: the firefly.
Fireflies populate our countryside and their arrival is often welcomed with sympathy and joy by adults and children. Often we know little about these insects, but they fascinate us, and for many they have marked important moments: an evening of meditation, a romantic walk, a night trip with children. Throughout our lives we are often notice and are momentarily entranced with these charismatic glowing bugs, and yet at other times it is easy to forget they exist.
Like fireflies, cicadas are an insect that not many would be able to draw in detail or recognise by their usual appearance, but we all know instantly by their characteristic signature – in this case their song – which for better or worse makes itself heard! And as with fireflies, cicadas offer a backdrop – a soundtrack – to parts of our lives, whether memories of a summer now far away, the annoyance of not being able to sleep at a campsite, or acting as a kind of summer lullaby.
Fireflies and cicadas are familiar and widespread presences in the Modena area, along with many other parts of Europe, and play a discreet but significant role in many people’s lives. Yet, we often take them for granted, without reflecting on their role in the ecosystem or our connection to them. Both insects, in fact, contribute to broader ecosystems: they control some species of parasites, are part of the food chain, and are important in scientific research, where they are used as bioindicators of environmental health and used to study biological processes such as tumors and infections. Today, however, climate change and pollution make their habitat less and less hospitable, causing a worrying decline in populations. This phenomenon highlights the fragility and complexity of natural ecosystems, and calls for the need to develop more targeted conservation strategies, but also a greater collective awareness of these luminous beings.
We would like you to tell us about your experiences with fireflies and cicadas, so that we can collect them and put them together (anonymously) to begin to better talk about human relationships with nature. We will use your stories to create connections and tie together scientific and humanistic insights of all kinds, through exhibitions, collages and workshops. Your stories will give life to future projects, and will help us set up fun and interesting excursions and activities on what insects teach us about our environment, from pollution levels, air quality and lighting, to biodiversity and climate change.
How do you participate? Click the link below and indulge in sending us stories and recordings – we accept voice messages, written texts, photographs or sound recordings (for example, of the song of a cicada). Submissions are welcome from everyone, and can relate to experiences based anywhere in the world. Please do not include your name – contributions will remain anonymous – but it would be very useful if you told us WHERE and WHEN the story you tell us took place (for example: “I remember seeing a swarm of fireflies while I was walking in the woods, in the throes of my thoughts, one evening in September 2024 around 9 pm”; or: “In my native country, Greece, the cicada is a symbol of birth and resurrection, and is treated with respect by those who live in the villages. It is a sound that reminds me of my childhood and the stories that my grandmother told me forty years ago at night before going to sleep”).
The submission page can be found here: https://pianeta-lab-storia.vercel.app/
Public Science Lab 