These Aren't Stars

Deep under the green hills of New Zealand there is a cave with a sky inside it – thousands of tiny blue lights glowing on the ceiling like stars. But they are not stars. Every single light is a hungry maggot, hanging dozens of sticky fishing lines into the dark. And the glow is the bait. We drift into the Waitomo Glowworm Cave with the two men who found it in 1887, look closely at the lights and the lines below them, find out why a glowworm's lamp is actually its kidney, why a whole cave ceiling glows in sync – and what happened in 1979, the year the stars almost went out. CHAPTERS 0:00 A cave with a sky inside it 0:48 The sky under the hill 2:11 Not a worm 3:41 The bait 5:41 A ceiling that glows together 7:06 A life of hunger 8:30 The year the stars went out FOOTAGE & IMAGES Excerpts used for commentary and education: Deep Look (KQED / PBS Digital Studios), Smithsonian Channel ("Into the Wild: New Zealand"), Science Friday ("Shedding Light on the New Zealand Glow Worm"), Stoked for Saturday / Jordan Poste ("Glowworms in Motion", "Waitomo's Lights"), Syrp ("The glowworm galaxy time-lapse"), New Zealand Geographic, RealNZ / Real Journeys (Te Anau Glowworm Caves), Travel Tuber (Spellbound Glowworm & Cave Tour), AdventurousPair ("Waitomo by Drone"), Jeff Hyer, IfWeGoTo (Marakoopa Cave, Tasmania). Images (Wikimedia Commons): Thomas Humphries – plan of Waitomo Caves, 1889 (public domain); Michael Willison – Glowworm Grotto, 1970 (CC BY 2.5); Douglas Steven Kerr / Otago Museum – adult Arachnocampa luminosa (CC BY 4.0); Pseudopanax – glowing larva and silk threads (public domain); Manko Marko – Waitomo Cave (CC BY-SA 4.0).