Science underfoot: How a bush walk led to a new find

What glows in the dark and has lots of legs?

No, it’s not the start of a terrible joke, but rather an exciting new discovery from Illawarra local Scott Kemp.

Scott first spotted glow-in-the-dark millipedes about 18 years ago, thought they were pretty cool, but assumed they were already a recognised species. Fast-forward to March last year when he was out looking for another popular glowing organism, the native Ghost Mushroom, and stumbled across them, literally, once again.

“I was … walking around in the darkness so my eyes were adjusted," Scott says. "And I’m looking around the scrub off the track and it was actually as I was walking, they were lighting up at my feet.”

Not being able to find any information about them, he decided to chat to bioluminescent enthusiast and local legend David Finlay when he met him out hunting for fireflies, incidentally something Scott had only learnt about after reading about David’s work around bioluminescence.

“I explained to him what I’d found and he said, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’”

They ended up heading out together on dark and it was then that they realised just how important a find they had made.

David, who we featured last year, will be listed as a co-discoverer. It’s believed that he is the first person to photograph this currently undescribed species.

These millipedes are especially interesting as they are both bioluminescent and biofluorescent. “When we first found them [glowing] with the black light, that’s biofluorescence. But it was only after … we went, 'What was that?' and picked one up, that it glowed [as its own light source]. That’s bioluminescence,” Scott explains.

David is currently working with Dr Dennis Black and will work further with scientists from the CSIRO later in the year. Discovering a species new to science is just the first step in a long process and, in the meantime, Scott and David continue to observe and document the species and its behaviour.

Of the discovery David says, “I’m really stoked actually. This is a big deal, to find another form of land-based bioluminescence … It’s all the work I do with science and nature coming full circle and rewarding me.”

Scott feels equally excited. “I’m pretty stoked,” he said. But it’s also spurred him on to keep looking, hoping to find more specimens in new locations and further add to the limited amount known about them. “Now it’s like everywhere I go, any new terrain or any new land, I’ve got to have a scratch around and see what I can find there."