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When Hannah Thompson crossed the hill from Whakatāne to Ōhope on Friday night it felt as if she’d arrived at the fictional moon Pandora from the Avatar movies.
She made the short trip with two friends about 11pm after they got the word water in the Ohiwa Harbour side of the spit was glowing with bioluminescence.
The trip turned out to be well worth the effort, with the water lighting up brilliantly as they splashed through it.
“It was incredible. It was like nothing we had ever seen before,” Thompson said. “It was like we had found ourselves in Pandora all of a sudden.”
She had seen pictures of a previous time, in 2017, when the sea at Ōhope became bioluminescent, and had thought the pictures somehow didn’t look real.
Hannah Thompson/Supplied
The sea at Ōhope glowing with bioluminescence.
Seeing it for herself was a revelation.
“It was so bright in real life,” Thompson said.
When the sea seems to glow it’s usually caused by a bloom of algae that produce light as a result of a chemical reaction triggered by movement or other changes in the environment.
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