The flash of fireflies in the summer evening must be the childhood memory of many people, but now the fireflies will be extinct? At the end of last month, taobao.com included the live wild fireflies in the category of prohibited commodity management. Driven by huge interests, fireflies have become a tool for many people to make huge profits. What is the principle of fireflies' luminescence?
If you love, please love deeply, no business, no harm! Liang xingcai, executive deputy director of Kunming Animal Museum, Kunming Animal Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, once reminded that China's fireflies are disappearing rapidly from south to north, among which Qinghai, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and other provinces are hard to collect samples. As early as November 2007, at the high-level forum of the Eurasian Natural History Museum held in Tianjin, experts attending the meeting said: China's fireflies are in danger of extinction.
Why do fireflies glow? The principle of fireflies glow
The luminescent principle of fireflies is: Fireflies have special luminescent cells, in which there are two kinds of chemicals, one is called luciferin (in fireflies, it is called luciferin), the other is called luciferase. Fluorescein can consume ATP under the catalysis of luciferase, and react with oxygen. In the reaction, fluorescein oxide in the excited state is produced. When fluorescein oxide returns from the excited state to the ground state, photons are released.
Almost all the energy released in the reaction is released in the form of light, only a small part is released in the form of heat, and the reaction efficiency is 95%. Fireflies emit light through this effect. The light thus emitted is called cold light because most of the energy is converted into light energy and only a small part into heat energy. Because the conversion of luminescent matter and light energy is quite efficient, fireflies can emit light for quite a long time. And the firefly itself can also control whether to perform such a function to control whether to emit light or not So the beetles don't overheat and burn. So far, human beings have not been able to produce such an efficient light source.