Tara Cornelisse and Sara Lewis

Opinion contributors

For tens of thousands of years, Bethany Beach fireflies have risen at dusk from their wetland homes along the Delaware coast to light up summer nights with brilliant double green flashes.

But, like an untold number of North America's more than 170 species of fireflies, the Bethany Beach firefly is in big trouble.

Unchecked threats to the firefly’s shrinking beachfront habitat have reduced it to just seven populations, almost all of them smaller than a football field.

That’s why this summer, the Center for Biological Diversity and The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation jointly petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to grant emergency Endangered Species Act protection to the firefly.

If it gains federal protection, the Bethany Beach firefly would be the first lightning bug to attain such status in the United States.

Trump's endangered species policy puts these fireflies at risk

Sadly, gravely imperiled species like this firefly were put at much greater risk this month by the Trump administration’s unprecedented rollbacks to regulations implementing key provisions of the Endangered Species Act.

The plight of the Bethany Beach firefly offers a vivid snapshot of the immediate and long-term effects of those rollbacks.

Abundant when it was discovered in 1953, this firefly lives only in freshwater coastal wetlands that are threatened by unchecked oceanfront development.

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The reason emergency federal protections are being sought for the firefly is because at this very moment, a new development is destroying the tiny stretch of wetlands that is the species’ largest remaining population.

Until this month, the Endangered Species Act has routinely served as an effective counterweight to make sure short-term economic considerations do not triumph over the need to protect habitat key to preventing extinction.

But under one of the Interior Department’s most damaging changes to the act, impacts that threaten to harm a species’ critical habitat will now be ignored unless they immediately impact the entirety of an animal’s habitat. This illogical, industry-driven change to the act disregards the typical reality of species extinction — a “death by a thousand cuts” process with compounding threats throughout a species range that ultimately lead to extinction.

For the Bethany Beach firefly, the impacts of the planned housing development would not even be considered because they do not impact the firefly’s entire habitat. This regulatory change is particularly harmful to species like fireflies that rarely relocate as their remaining populations become more fragmented.

Although climate change-driven sea level rise is a very real threat faced by the Bethany Beach firefly, its chances of getting species-saving protection under the act were further hampered by the new rule’s restrictions against the designation of critical habitat for species threatened by climate change. The new rule also forbids designation of critical habitat for areas where species need to move to avoid climate impacts.

In a final blow, the Trump changes would eliminate protections for wildlife newly designated as “threatened” under the act. Even if the firefly were to receive threatened status, unlike past threatened species — which received the majority of protections provided for species designated as “endangered” — it would receive no protections whatsoever, unless the agency created a special rule to protect it.

These limitations will only speed up extinction

Taken as a whole, these changes offer little hope that the Trump Interior Department will do anything to make sure the brilliant double-green flashes of the Bethany Beach firefly aren’t snuffed out forever. In fact, these efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act will play a direct role in accelerating the extinction of species like this gravely imperiled firefly.

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These changes to the world’s most successful conservation law, which has prevented the extinction of 99% of protected species, come as a growing body of evidence indicates that not only fireflies, but insects worldwide, are declining at alarming rates.

The question is whether the nation with the world’s strongest conservation heritage will suddenly walk away from the work of saving species like the Bethany Beach firefly. Will we now just let them die out, one species at a time?

Will the nation that took extraordinary steps to ensure our skies remain graced by soaring American bald eagles, brown pelicans and California condors merely stand by and watch as the magical pageantry of the fireflies’ courtship dance goes dark?

Tara Cornelisse is an entomologist and senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity’s environmental health program. Follow her on Twitter: @ConservationBug

Sara Lewis is a professor of evolutionary ecology at Tufts University, author of "Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies" and co-chair of the The International Union for Conservation of Nature Firefly Specialist Group.