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Malaysia's Fire Fly Farm With Beautiful FirefliesMalaysia's Fire Fly Farm With Beautiful Fireflies
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Christophers adventures amongst the fireflies
I visited the Kampung Kuantan (Kuantan Village ) firefly sanctuary this past Saturday, Feb 7th 2004 with my friends, Raphael, Jacqueline and Suriana. We arrived at about 8.50 pm. It was quite cool, having rained very heavily just a few minutes earlier.
As we got out of the car, we noticed that the Full Moon was exceptionally low on horizon, appeared to be orange in color and very much larger than normal. It was absolutely gorgeous to look at. I knew immediately that I was looking at what is called a "Harvest Moon", and knew that there was a scientific explanation for the phenomena, although I could not place my finger on it at the time. I later found a very good explanation of why this phenomena occurs at this website http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moonorange/
Anyway, we quickly walked to the jetty, and paid our RM 40 (US$ 10.44) for the row boat at the ticket counter. We then donned our life jackets and entered the boat. Our guide was explaining the firefly phenomenon to us, as he rowed slowly down a narrow tributary of the Selangor River . Usually, these fireflies do not come out when there is a full moon, or during a heavy rain. We were quite fortunate to see so many fireflies that night nonetheless. Now, this was my third trip to this sanctuary. My first trip was a moonless night, so it was easy to thousands upon thousands of fireflies, lighting the trees on both sides of the river banks like Christmas trees.
These fireflies are really 6mm long beetles, which belong to the Lampyridae species. They produce a cool yellowish-greenish glow in the lower abdomen. Both male and female fireflies are able to flash, but only the males flash in unison; the synchronized display serves to attract a mate. Incidentally, the fireflies are called "kelip-kelip" in the Malay language. The word means "twinkle".
These fireflies live on a mangrove species known as the Beremban tree (Sonneratia Caseolaris). In fact, our boat got so close to these leaves that we could touch them. We could have even touched the fireflies on these trees. We were that close to them!
There was a particular spot where we could see that huge orangish full moon peeking between two firefly-laden trees. As Suriani put it, it looked like the stars fallen from the skies onto the trees. An apt description, given that we could see real stars in the sky and then, fireflies on these trees!
Actually, it was a good night for astronomical observations as well. I was able to identify Jupiter in the night sky. Orion was also very visible from our boat, as a number of other stars, not usually seen from the cities. I wish I had brought my astronomical field guide with me, so that I could try to identify those stars. From what I could tell, these were stars belonged to a number of constellations from the Southern Hemisphere. The stars from the Northern hemisphere were not completely visible that night, as they were obscured by clouds.
We slowly sailed back to the jetty, got off the boat, unhooked our life jackets, and drove the car back to the city (Kuala Lumpur ) after that. It was a marvelous trip.
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