This page is the garden at night, and your pointer is a lamp. Move it about and your bug will crawl, flutter or circle after the light. Choose a different bug at the bottom, and tap the notes to open them.
The glowing one is a female beetle that never grows wings. The male looks like an ordinary small brown beetle.
The glow is made by a chemical reaction in her tail. Almost none of the energy is wasted as heat.
She climbs a grass stem and shines so that males flying overhead can find her.
Once she has mated she puts out her light, lays her eggs and dies soon after.
The larva eats small snails. It bites them several times, and the bite turns the snail to soup.
Males are drawn to artificial lights and never find the females. Lit-up places lose their glow-worms.
Meet them all
Lampyris noctiluca
The female is a wingless, segmented, brown beetle whose tail shines with a steady green light at night.
Noctua pronuba
A brown moth, like a strip of bark at rest, that flashes bright orange-yellow hindwings when it flies.
Deilephila elpenor
A plump moth in bright pink and olive green, with a pink stripe down its back and narrow, pointed wings.
Limax maximus
A big, pale grey-brown slug spotted and striped with black, like a leopard, with a ridge along its tail.
Through the year
The green months are when you can find each one on a warm night in Britain. The bug following you is shown in red.
Lend a hand
Outdoor lights that burn all night draw moths away from feeding and breeding. Use a sensor, or switch them off.
Honeysuckle, evening primrose and tobacco plant open or smell strongest at dusk, for moths.
Glow-worms need rough grass with snails in it, and darkness to be seen by their mates.
Shine a torch on a sheet on a warm night and see what lands. Let them go when you have looked.
Elephant hawk-moth caterpillars feed on rosebay willowherb and garden fuchsias.
Leopard slugs eat other slugs. Poison kills your helpers along with the pests.
British bugs: 4 more places
Real photos of the bugs on this page. Tap one to see it bigger.
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons and are used under free licences. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews. Open a photo to see who took it.
Britain has about sixty kinds of butterfly and two and a half thousand kinds of moth. Most of what lives in a garden only comes out once you have gone indoors.
Back to the topPond and stream bugs live on their own page: choosing one takes you there.
Bugs from other parts of the world live on their own pages: choose another.