This summer, my kids and I are participating in Firefly Watch, a citizen science project from the Boston Museum of Science that combines an annual summer evening ritual with scientific research. We are having a lot of fun keeping track of the fireflies in our backyard and learning to appreciate their unique behaviors.

Science writer Carl Zimmer has an article in the New York Times explaining how evolutionary biology is helping researchers to understand firefly courtship signals.

It's a fascinating topic and another reminder of the usefulness of evolutionary theory for making sense out of biological observations.