As our lives keep getting busier, we get almost no time to appreciate the eccentricities of life. Nature is full of beautiful absurdities. One such wonder is the glowing forest on the Western Ghats. This forest seems too weird to be true but Mother Nature has a tremendous ability to surprise you.
The first thing that struck me when I found out about these glowing forests was that it looked straight out of the world of Pandora (from James Cameron’s Avatar).
In our own beautiful bio-diverse backyard, the Western Ghats, there exists a rare phenomenon that brightens the forests for a few weeks every year.
This glow is a result of bio-luminescent fungi. This fungi glows in the dark to give the impression that the trees in the forest are glowing. The forest floor is covered in a night light that makes for one of the biggest spectacles in nature.
The Western Ghats are away from civilisation and are hardly ever messed with. The absence of human interaction makes these forest serene.
The Karnataka-Maharashtra-Goa belt is home for bio-luminescence on land. Scientists believe that bio-luminescence is a common phenomena but to see it on land is extremely rare. Only around 70 of the over-1,00,000 species of fungi are capable of bio-luminescence.
These sightings of the glowing forest has been made near Chorla Ghats, Goa, about 60 km off of Panjim.
If you decide to make a trip to the glowing forests please remember that it’s a fragile eco-system. Even if you reach the place in the monsoons, please don’t mess up the place. The eco-system will only respect you if you respect nature.
Mother Nature and her wonders never cease to amaze me!
