The Glowdown on Peru’s Newfound Species

Nature photographer Jim Cremer who runs tours in the Peruvian rainforest from his website, PeruNature.com. A few years back, while exploring the Tambopata Research Center in the Peruvian Amazon, Cremer came across an as-yet-undiscovered worm, measuring about a half inch in length and emitting an eerie, other-worldly green glow.

Entomologists have now declared the “glow worms” to actually be the larval stage of a potentially new species of click beetles. (It’s possible that they are in fact a sub-species of an already-identified beetle.) And not all members of the new group actually emit the glow – out of 10,000 identified specimens, only a few hundred demonstrate this trait.

Researchers have compared the new beetles to the infamous “sand worms” from the classic monster movie “Tremors.” Like the villains in that film, the worms lie under the soil and wait until they sense movement from prey above, before leaping out and clamping down hard with their jaws.

Unlike the sand worms, their prey is mostly ants and small insects, not Kevin Bacon.