After driving for over an hour in the wrong direction due to the worst directions ever given by a hotel clerk, Josh and I came upon the dirt road that, thirty dusty kilometers later, led us through a driving tunnel before reaching the glow worm tunnel in Wollemi National Park.
The information board said koalas could be found in the area, but I didn't see any!
It was a gentle twenty minute hike to reach the cave. It was a hot day, so the cool cave air felt especially good. We used my headlamp to find our way through the pitch black cave and, of course, the batteries started to fade.
See those faint lights on the right hand side in the photos below? Glow worms! They were reasonably bright in person but it took half a dozen photos before we could get them to show up in pictures.
So what is a glow worm? For starters, it's not a worm but larva. The reason for glowing seems to depend on which variety of glow worm is in question but, as far as I can tell, glow worms in Australia use their bottoms to glow to attract prey as well as mates. They spin stringy webs called snares to catch other insects. Once they become adults, they no longer glow. Adult glow worms cannot feed so they die after just a couple of weeks.
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