Chinese Valentine's Day: Disaster for fireflies

An item page on the e-commerce site taobao.com. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

"We've been watching this problem on taobao.com for years. This year the selling seems to be more centralized. In the past, customers could place orders on number of fireflies as they wished. But they now have to buy fixed number of fireflies in sets this year," said Fang Jianbo at Qinghuan Volunteer Center. He said thirty fireflies with six given for free are sold at about 160 yuan, which is the lowest price for a set.

Many of the sellers claim their fireflies to be captive-bred. Experts say that nearly 99 percent of these "captive-bred" fireflies are fake, for the artificial propagation of fireflies is costly, nearly twice as the price of the fireflies sold online.

According to investigations by an environmental organization in Jiangsu province, there have been more than 60 firefly exhibitions nationwide this year. Such exhibitions, however, are deemed as harmful to the environment, according to experts.

"It threatens the indigenous ecosystem and the species being brought in may not be able to survive," said Fu Xinhua, a biologist at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, Hubei province. Fu suggested people go to the wild or the santuaries to watch fireflies.

Fireflies were once a familiar part of summer evenings in much of China. But the tiny flashes that used to light up fields have dwindled or lost, experts say, to pollution and altered natural habitats.