In the last couple of years I’ve looked at thousands of webcomics. Sometimes I wish I’d kept a list of those whose first page is captioned “It begins” or “So it begins” or “And so it begins.”

Fireflies in Borneo have a wonderfully simple and distributed way of synchronizing their blinks.

If I had the skill I’d make a screensaver of it. A couple of ways to play with the concept:

I wouldn’t expect all bugs to have exactly the same period, but how much variation is tolerable? What if there are two populations, indistinguishable except that their periods differ by an irrational factor?

What if each bug has a different hue, and responds only to others that are near on the color wheel (perhaps only in one direction)? Might a stable cycle result, rather than synchrony of all?