Deep in the Australian forest lives one of the most mesmerizing animals on Earth.
Inconspicuous under sunlight, at night, they get together to form living constellations
so beautiful that prey can't resist.
These are the deadly sirens of Australia, the glow worms.
Hi, I'm Danielle Dufault and you're watching Animalogic.
Tonight we're in the Great Otway National Park, in Victoria, Australia,
looking for some of the smallest animals we've ever filmed: glow worms.
We heard this is one of the best places to see them,
and we couldn't pass up the opportunity to film one of the greatest animal light shows on Earth.
We're at Gray River right now and uh, it's pretty late.
The sun sets, the stars are out, and the moon is pretty much full.
We're out here tonight to try and find some glow worms.
After a while of looking, we got deep into the forest and there they were.
Oh my God!
I can't believe what I'm seeing here.
It looks like I'm walking through space.
The moon is full and there are stars above me,
but I'd say that the stars that are here, scattered among the trees, are just as formidable.
Despite their name and appearance,
glow worms are way more closely related to a house fly than to an earth worm.
They're actually baby insects.
The glow worms that we're looking for tonight are the
larvae of a fly species, called the Fungus Gnat.
These glow worms are to fungus gnats what caterpillars are to butterflies.
Some bioluminescent beetles are also called glow worms,
but here in Australia, glow worm refers to the Gnat genus, Arachnocampa.
There are nine recognized species in this genus.
One of them lives in New Zealand, another one in Tasmania,
and the remaining seven in mainland Australia.
The glow worms of the Great Otway are the aptly named arachnocampa otwayensis.
Their name means 'the spider worm from the Otway.'
They don't have eight legs, but they do have a similar hunting strategy.
Their glow comes from strands of mucus
a single larva can make up to 70 strands, which can be up to 40 centimetres long in some cases.
Flying insects and other small animals get attracted to the light
and then get snared in the mucus.
The glow worm then descends from its nest and consumes its prey,
just like a spider in a spider web.
Their most common prey are midges, though mosquitos and moths are often consumed.
This might seem like an over complicated way of hunting, but it's surprisingly effective,
and a single colony might contain tens of thousands of individuals.
The only trade-off is that they can only live in areas with no wind as it would tangle the strands.
That's why they're mostly found in caves or deep in dense forests.
Their bioluminescence is the result of a chemical reaction.
A luciferase enzyme acts on a protein molecule called a luciferin.
Their name might sound familiar because they come from the word, Lucifer, which means light-giver.
And light they give.
The larval stage of the fungus gnat will last for
up to a year and then they'll pupate for just a week.
Female pupae are bright and they're thought to attract the adult males,
who are waiting for the females to emerge from their cocoons to mate with them.
I would tell the males to chill and just let them be
but their final form only lasts about a week, so there's no time to waste.
After about seven days of mating, the female lays about a hundred eggs and dies.
Males die shortly after as they cannot feed.
Since light is a necessary part of their life, they have evolved a lot of ways to control it.
They can manage the intensity and emit more light when the time is right to catch prey.
If they feel vibrations in their snares they will glow brighter.
If they're exposed to light they will switch themselves off.
They're also known to observe each other and synchronize their glow cycles,
though we're still not sure why.
There's so much we still don't know about these beautiful hunters,
but we're starting to see the light.
So what should I talk about next?
Please let me know in the comments and be sure to
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Thanks for watching and see ya.