Te Anau (and Glow-worms)

Te Anau ought to be more interesting than it is, but it’s basically a town that sprang up to support the Lake Manapouri Hydroelectric power project and has had to find a life for itself as a tourist centre ever since – rather like Turangi on the North Island. It’s not an unpleasant place – its presence on the lakefront guarantees that – but it’s rather dull and characterless. But it’s a good base for the Real Journeys trips to Milford and Doubtful Sounds, and there’s all-day free parking.

Lake Te Anau is one of the purest lakes in the world and is a beautiful blue when the sun’s out. On my most recent trip there was nothing to see but fog, but here it is in sunnier times:

A further attraction is a trip across the lake, at night, to see glow-worms. The New Zealand glow-worm is a genuinely ‘wormy’ thing, unlike the various other creatures known wrongly as glow-worms in other parts of the world including Britain and the USA. Here they live in a limestone cave with an underground stream – they don’t fly around – so unlike in the UK and USA you have to go to visit them.

As a natural phenomenon limestone caves, underground streams and glow-worms are fine – but they weren’t the best choice for an evening when sleep and warmth were something of a priority. And with only three visitors and three staff, we must have burned up enough petrol in our 1½ hour boat trip to completely out-do any benefit to the environment from running the cave’s lighting system on local hydroelectricity!

New Zealand glow-worms are the pupa stage of an egg-pupa-larva-fly chain, and they are the only part which can actually eat. A glow-worm lives for about 9 months, then changes into a larva for a few weeks, and then a fly for about 4 days. The fly has no mouth and no stomach: all it can do is mate rather frantically, then it runs out of energy and dies. It seems a rather sad and pointless existence, but there we are.

The glow-worm’s light is produced in its stomach by releasing a chemical, and they do it to mimic the appearance of the night sky – thereby attracting insects towards them as they hang around the roofs of caves. The unsuspecting insects become caught in the myriads of sticky threads which the glow-worms spin, and the glow-worms then eat them. The more hungry the glow-worm, the stronger its light glows.

You can’t photograph the glow-worms’ light – it’s far too faint – but here is a fake picture of what they look like: