Artificial breeding and rearing of fireflies

・Genji Firefly Breeding Project

  The Moriyama HOTARU(Firefly )Museum provides artificial breeding and guidance of rearing for fireflies. The museum provides the larvaes of firefly raised in the breeding laboratory to citizens, children and local communities requested for environmental studies and also releases them into the HOTARU (Firefly) river at the museum.

  We have also created a “HOTARU  map” (firefly map) based on the results of flight surveys conducted by citizen researchers. And we have conducted surveys and researches on the environment surrounding fireflies, presenting our findings at the national firefly research conferences several times.

   We have released artificially bred larvae in various places in the city, and this has helped to raise citizens’ interest in the water environment. In the future, we are aiming to further increase the number of native Genji fireflies in the HOTARU (Firefly) river of the HOTARU (Firefly) Forest and other rivers in the city.