- Animals
- ›Arthropods
- ›Hexapods
- ›Insects
- ›Winged and Once-winged Insects
- ›Beetles
- ›Water, Rove, Scarab, Long-horned, Leaf, and Snout Beetles
- ›Elateriform Beetles
- ›Click, Firefly, and Soldier Beetles
- ›Click Beetles
- ›Agrypninae
- ›Headlight Beetles
- ›Ignelater

Cucubano
Ignelater luminosus
Ignelater luminosus is a bioluminescent species of click beetle native to the island of Puerto Rico, one of several Caribbean species in the genus Ignelater that are known as cucubanos. Cucubanos are often confused with fireflies, which are in a different family (Lampyridae), but they emit light from the thorax, unlike true fireflies. Their paired prothorax light organs and single light organ on the anterior surface of the abdomen gives the appearance of two "headlights" and one "backlight", which it can turn off independently.
Because light pollution interferes with their reproduction, they prefer rural areas without much development.
Listen
Looking for field recordings…
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
—
geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Ignelater luminosus in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 489714.