The current climate crisis has a less well known but equally ominous threat – the global biodiversity crisis. Billions of dollars are spent annually searching for life in outer space, yet here on Earth it is estimated we can only describe roughly 15% of Earth’s life forms. Plant species and  animals are increasingly threatened with extinction while conservation biologists race to assess the current state of global biodiversity attempting to identify knowledge gaps. For example, fireflies are popular charismatic insects, yet a recent North American assessment found that for greater than 50% of described firefly species, we know too little to determine whether they are common, or rare, or even where they occur.

Dr. Christopher Heckscher’s desire to learn more about the distribution of fireflies in eastern North America unexpectedly resulted in a crusade to explore rare and uncommon wetlands. The resulting work has been the discovery of seven species of fireflies in four Northeastern states that for more than 200 years had remained unknown to entomologists, hidden in remote wetlands in some of the most populated regions of our country.

Christopher M. Heckscher, Ph.D. has been studying the distribution of fireflies in eastern North America for 25 years. He holds a B.S. in Wildlife Biology with a Minor in Zoology from Colorado State University, an M.S. in Applied Ecology and Entomology and a Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology and Entomology both from the University of Delaware. For fifteen years, he was the Delaware State Zoologist for The Nature Conservancy and the Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife.  Since 2008, he has been a professor of Environmental Science at Delaware State University where he studies both birds and fireflies. He holds positions on the Delaware Natural Areas Advisory Council, the Delaware Native Species Commission, and the IUCN International Species Survival Commission. His research has recently been featured in a Netflix documentary, in Popular Science magazine, and in Smithsonian Magazine.

The library's “Science and Society - Making Sense of the World Around Us” lecture series is co-organized and moderated by Fred Dylla, Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Physics and author of Scientific Journeys, Linda Dylla, former public information officer at the Jefferson Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy, and Colin Norman, the former News Editor at Science.

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Basic written instructions for using Zoom may be found here and a brief video tutorial may be found here. Closed captioning is available for all our sessions. Information on enabling closed captioning in Zoom may be found here.