ENVIRONMENT
Winged discovery UC Riverside student’s firefly find lights up a daytime excursion Written by Jim Steinberg
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PHOTOs courtesy UC RIVERSIDE
The firefly, top, found by Joshua Oliva is about half a centimeter long and black in color with an orange halo-like pattern on the shield covering its head. The UC Riverside student is collecting and cataloging 300 insects for a field entomology class.
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| riversidemagazine.com | august-september 2015
t was not your traditional mother-son outing. When Joshua Oliva took his mother out to collect insects for a UC Riverside entomology class, he knew he stumbled onto an amazing find — a firefly. Fireflies are an unusual sight in Southern California, but Oliva, a history major, got an even bigger surprise when he sought confirmation of his find with an expert on campus. Senior museum scientist Doug Yanega took the insect discovery to a new level, telling the 24-year-old Oliva that his firefly belonged to a species that had not been seen before. “This is one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” said Oliva, who was born in Burbank but spent several childhood years in Guatemala, where he collected insects as a child. “I felt I finally did something that mattered.” Contrary to what many believe, some 30 varieties of fireflies are in Southern California, although not all of them glow, Yanega says. These carnivorous, nocturnal beetles occur in small numbers near springs and seeps where they are infrequently seen — especially in the hills of San Diego County, San Bernardino County’s Lytle Creek and in the Santa Monica Mountains. They only fly briefly after dusk, he adds, and their range is concentrated around areas where they can find small snails to feed on. “No wonder people don’t realize they are out there,” Yanega said. World authorities on fireflies at the University of Florida have confirmed Yanega’s