100,000 LED Become Fake Fireflies On Tokyo's Sumida River

Maybe it’s just us, but it feels as if bioluminescence is having a bit of a moment right now. A few months ago everyone was all a-flutter about these awesome long exposure photos of fireflies, we marveled at an interactive jellyfish installation in Vancouver and the American Natural History Museum has an exhibition on view dedicated to these creatures of light.

Last weekend, at the inaugural Tokyo Hotaru festival, some 100,000 LED lights did their best firefly impersonation as they floated down the Sumida River. Panasonic provided the LED balls, which were supposedly solar powered and designed to light up upon impact with water. Before you go getting all environmental though about LEDs polluting our waterways, you can rest easy knowing that the LEDs were all caught in a large net and removed from the river (though we gotta speculate that they must’ve lost at least one or two in there).