Drawing with light: spatiotemporal signals of discrete light flashes in firefly swarms

How animals encode and communicate information through movement and internal states remains a fundamental question in biological physics. Photuris forresti fireflies exhibit a distinct light based flash-train pattern, where males create unique dot-dash shapes across space and time as part of their mating ritual. These patterns have not previously been studied from either a spatial or temporal perspective, and we aim to explore whether the spatial movements are stereotypic rather than random. The former could suggest that specific shapes carry distinct meanings within the species’ communication. We conducted several seasons of stereo field video recordings on swarms of male P. forresti, and have created spatiotemporal reconstructions of the firefly flashes. Preliminary analysis reveals recurring structures in individual flash-trains and variations in the temporal pattern. Our goal is to characterize these flash-trains and understand the recurring spatiotemporal patterns that emerge through a principal component analysis, providing deeper insights into the physics of light based communication.