Some of these life forms are vegetative, some are animal and some may be human.

Teenagers are famously nocturnal. Perhaps young Mayleigh is out there with her boyfriend.

Nature plays cruel tricks on girls. Mayleigh may do fine on her SATs, but don’t count on her intelligence when it comes to falling in love. She’d marry the mayhem guy from the Allstate television ads if she had the chance. As Mrs. Perkins, my former Ann Arbor landlady, said to me when I optimistically told her I thought young women were getting smarter about dating, “Ain’t nobody that smart.”

As I have mentioned in previous columns, there are doubtless northern shrews, tardigrades, deer and the occasional black bear, and this last summer there were probably fireflies as well. Fireflies are endangered, but according to entomologists, they’ve been making a comeback in the Adirondacks (although I saw only one, and I was watching for them). Fireflies make the North Country night all the more magical and romantic. Fireflies, or lightning bugs, are bioluminescent beetles; they attract mates with flashes of light.

There are more than 2,000 species of fireflies. In some species, even the eggs glow. Most taste terrible to predators. The three main groups of flashing fireflies are Photinus, Pyractomena and Photuris.

The photinus firefly has added protection: A bufotenine like substance in its body, similar to the toxin found in toads.

The Photuris species does not contain this toxin; the female simply acquires it by eating photinus males. She captures them in flight, by stealing their bodies out of spider webs or by luring them under false pretenses by mimicking the flashes of female photinus. Hello, sailor! Then she eats them. Insect boffins do not know why she eats only males.

I just learned the word boffin. It’s informal British for a person who possesses some complex or arcane knowledge or skill. A British boffin is similar to an American nerd.

Opossums (different from possums), while possibly not as magical or romantic as fireflies, are also nocturnal creatures that may be in your backyard at night.

Opossums eat thousands of deer ticks, which is a big point in their favor here in Upstate New York.

According to Carey Institute senior scientist Rick Ostfeld, “Opossums are extraordinarily good groomers it turns out — we never would have thought that ahead of time — but they kill the vast majority — more than 95% of the ticks that feed on them. So these opossums are walking around the forest floor, hoovering up ticks right and left, killing over 90% of these things, and so they are really protecting our health.”

Ostfeld has also written that one opossum can kill and eat 5 thousand ticks in a single season, and we wonder how he ciphered that out. Still, he is a recognized expert on Lyme disease, so we will take his word for it.

Other opossum facts: A female opossum can conceive and bear young in just 13 days, in which time the male, apparently not terribly interested in commitment, is long gone. Never mind. Opossums are marsupials. The little ones crawl out of the birth canal on their own, making their way to their mother’s pouch. For four months or so they stay with her, sometimes riding on her back.

Opossums very rarely become rabid; they are more resistant to rabies than any other wild animal.

Opossums are transients, so it is pointless to live-trap them and set them free somewhere else. They are constantly moving on. Removing them just makes room in the ecological system of your backyard for skunks, raccoons and other creatures.

Opossums don’t dig, because their hands are too delicate, nor can they jump. Despite these drawbacks, they have persisted since dinosaurs ruled the world. Their fossil remains date back 70 million years.

Opossums eat, along with ticks, overripe fruit, beetles, cockroaches, snails, slugs, mice and rats. They also eat cat food, but oddly enough cats and opossums are known to tolerate each other.

It may surprise you to learn that there is a National Opossum Society (not for opossums but for opossum boffins). Have a good week.

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)