Glowing Fungus Gnat Maggots of Ruakuri Cave

by Whitney Mackman (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown New Zealand

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With tubes balancing on one shoulder and hands hovering over the cave’s sharp limestone rock face, we foot-searched for the next step forward in what was quickly becoming a river. We climbed in the near dark, save what little the headlamp illuminated, stepping into black water, plunging into icy unknown. We had to react without snapping a single stalactite hanging down or shattering a single stalagmite shooting up – everywhere! – puckering any flat surface with towering deposits of limestone loneliness. The two fragile crystals reach for one another for decades but may never touch. I felt my way further toward earth’s core to find our guide crouched at the edge of the waterfall he had warned about. With my heels on the edge and my back towards the abyss, I put my tube against my butt and he counted: “1, 2…” I didn’t wait to hear “3”; I leapt back and out and took a deep breath. I fell four feet and – SMACK! – gravity pulled me under, then buoyancy surfaced me up. Cold water rushed off my face to cheers and I caught my breath through a smile so wide it hurt my frozen face. “So, they aren’t actually glowworms,” our guide stalled as we bobbed our tubes closer to him. “Turn off your headlamps and look up,” he instructed. Here was the moment we had waited for: the cave ceiling twinkled the purest, brightest blue – poets would call it electric cyan. With heads back and mouths open, we collectively gasped; our guide, anticipating the exact moment our jaws would drop, said, “They are actually maggots.” My mouth snapped shut and I dry heaved, resenting the false advertisement. “But if we invited you to see our glowing maggot cave, would you come?” “No!” we replied in unison, wondering when those glow-maggots would drop on us, or poop on us, in the 65-meter deep dark. “Don’t worry, they won’t poop on you because they don’t poop,” he reassured us. “They have no way to poop, so their waste piles in the back of their bodies and their excretory tubes become bioluminescent.” Their butts glow the milkiest, most iridescent blue I have ever seen; they are a literal shit show. Arachnocampa luminosa, exclusive to New Zealand, is actually a type of fungus gnat. They dangle sticky spit fishing lines, turn on the blue-light butt special, and entangle bugs hopeless enough to believe their glow is a way out of the darkness. Over time, they pull up captives and pulverize them from the inside out – a fate National Geographic deems one of the top ten worst ways to die. When no longer hungry but very horny, glow-nats mate for 48 hours. Then, totally spent and fearing fatherhood, the male dies. The female lasts only a bit longer in order to lay 120 eggs, and then, at the thought of 120 children, she dies. However, only one child will survive. The first egg to hatch is the only egg to hatch because glow-maggots are cannibals, and the first-born feasts first on its would-be brothers and sisters. “Why do they do this?” our guide asked. Nobody answered, already feeling duped; nobody moved. “So people like you can tell their friends they went all the way to New Zealand to tube through a dark cave full of only-child cannibalistic maggots with shiny shit who shag themselves to death.” In the pool under the waterfall, we linked feet under armpits and snaked away as one human eel: floating in total blackness, in total silence besides the slow swish of water, staring in disbelief at the blue glowworm Milky Way suspended above. The beauty is incomprehensible; as I stared, my limbs went slightly numb and I lost all grasp of space and time. Tiny blue stars – the purest blue – so bright against the blackness, just out of reach in the dark. I wanted to reach, but why risk touching something tangible and transporting myself from enchantment? I couldn’t take my eyes off the kaleidoscopic dazzle above me. The current pushed us forward, but I kept turning back, drifting through a dark liquid space, wanting those tantalizing constellations to guide me out of the darkness.