Celebrating the Chinese New Year - the year of the rat - was something new for our family. We are used to our typical, American "Chinese" food but this was something new and different. We were invited by some friends from John Deere to come with them to Singapura, a local restaurant to celebrate. There were 22 people total with our group, 11 per table. We ate 11 separate courses throughout the night (you can see two of them in our pictures.) Towards the end of our meal the lions showed up for a dancing and firecracker show. It was very unique and interesting to see . . . the food was also (surprisingly) good!
On Sunday we traveled about an hour from our house to Mt. Tamborine to go hiking. We first hiked through a beautiful rainforest to Curtis Falls. We are getting stronger and stronger with Bryan lugging a 34 pound toddler on his shoulders and me supporting a 20 pound infant in the Bjorn! We also stopped to view the glow worm caves at Mt. Tamborine and learn more about this interesting creature (see Australian Education for the week.) Our final stop was at Witches Falls, another lengthy hike through a rainforest. It has been raining alot and, as you can imagine, there is alot of rain in a rainforest, so the paths have been muddy and sometimes difficult to pass. We ended up going almost all the way through a 3.5K circuit only to have to turn around and head back along the same path because water was covering the path . . . uugghh. I think we totaled 3-5 miles in one day but it was refreshing to get to be out in the open and see some spectacular sights!
Australian Education: Glow-Worms
As mentioned in the post above we got to see glow-worms this week so I thought I would share some interesting information about them.
Glow-worms are the larvae (immature stage) of a small fly. The larval stage is the only stage in their life cycle that can glow. The adults are delicate flies that do not have working mouthparts, and as such, only live for a small number of days (females two day, males six days). AS the adults are unable to feed, glow-worms must gain enough sustenance during the larval stage to get them through the rest of their lifecycle. The larvae are believed to live for approximately one year, although this is heavily dependent on environmental conditions and prey abundance. The glow-worms that we viewed are the local species, which are found only in rainforest areas of southeast Queensland.
Glow-worms glow to attract small insects that emerge from the leaf litter and water around which the glow-worms reside. The glow-worms construct "snares" (like a spider's web) made from silk thread and sticky droplets to capture the insects attracted to their glow. The chemicals needed to generate the glow are all produced within the body of the glow-worm and the light is projected out of the very rear end of the larva. The light produced is reportedly 99% light and only 1% hear, making it an extremely efficient source of light!
Cute poem about a glow-worm:
I wish I was a glow-worm,
a glow-worms never glum
'cos how can you be grumpy
when the sun shines out your bum!
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