Jono Ridler is swimming the length of the North Island unassisted… but he has a lot of help.
While editing Sarah Newey and Simon Townsley’s feature story about the surge of methamphetamine and HIV in Fiji (page 50), I read a Rapid Assessment report from a team commissioned by the United Nations. They spent weeks in Suva in 2025, interviewing dozens of men and women who inject meth. In their own words, these people tell of the sharing of equipment, including needles; the makeshift ways in which they mix up their fix; the illness and poverty and violence that coalesce around addiction and so often drive it; the shame. “The judgmental looks,” says 35-year-old Aliyah. “The eyes. The Fijian eyes that judge you…” The researchers also convened talanoa, group conversations, with leaders in health, law enforcement, churches and the civil service. In these transcripts, one religious leader calls addiction “demonic”. He says his own daughter has been affected, and that most families stay silent on the matter because of shame. The report notes that such stigma, together with the country’s fragmented officialdom and law enforcement, is a barrier to the fixes that seem so obvious from here: clean needles, prophylactic medication, education in safer drug use. New Zealand has our own national shames. Equally fixable. Equally stymied by the desire to cleave to the cultural status quo. Very often our leaders don’t come right out and say that’s what’s going on. But let us here, as Kiwis love to do, call a spade a spade. Agriculture accounts for about half of New Zealand’s planet-heating emissions, yet after the 2023 election, the incoming government reversed plans to include it in our emissions trading scheme. Read: they did not want to annoy anyone in Red Bands. Likewise, in the face of explicit advice from the Climate Change Commission, the coalition resolved to go easy on methane. On this front we have not come far since 2003, when a tax on methane emissions by livestock was first proposed by Helen Clark’s government and scornfully shot down by, it seemed, the whole country. Ratepayers can’t get to grips with the realities of actually paying enough to keep things ticking over, so local governments have instead drop-kicked the infrastructure can, and millions of litres of raw human sewage, into Wellington Harbour. After a brief hiatus, officials are, inconceivably, once again inviting international companies to prospect for oil and gas at sea and on land. But good keen men need good keen jobs and it’s really very easy, and lately very Kiwi, to look only at such ordinary short-term needs and not at the existentially urgent imperative to stop burning things. Our climate policy, right now, is short-termism writ large. On which: in February the government announced its support, and likely significant financial backing, too, for a billion-dollar terminal in Taranaki touted to help plug a gap in the national energy supply. It would process liquefied natural gas, an expensive fossil fuel we’ll have to import using—more fossil fuels. As a country we abhor red tape. Enter the fast-track-approvals regime, which means you can get your coal mines and sand mines, your quarries and your sea-level property developments up and running lickety-split. The irony is that this legislation is precisely the sort of gear-change the country needs, were it to prioritise projects that will take us rapidly forwards. Solar. Wind. Resilient pipes and roads. Imagine. Instead, in the face of multiple, escalating crises, we are dithering and obfuscating and putting dangerously outdated cultural biases above clear and compelling evidence. We can fix it, all of it. But we have to get over ourselves first.
Timelapse photography shows the tiny superstars of the world’s most famous glow-worm cave system, Waitomo, flickering in response to us pesky humans. Noise makes the glow-worms dial up their bioluminescence, and artificial light prompts them to dim, or switch off for a while. This heat map tracks the intensity of the light show across the year beginning June 2024. It was made by David Merritt, a scientist at the University of Queensland who specialises in glow-worms and has long worked with the kaitiaki at Waitomo. He set the camera up in Glowworm Grotto, where tour operators pull boats slowly along a U-bend using a system of cables on the cave ceiling. It recorded one 30-second exposure every half hour. Merritt explains that the white blips represent moments during which tour operators use a floodlight on the cave’s jetty—a necessity for safety checks, the occasional desilting of the river, and for wiping down boats soaked by the dripping ceiling overnight. In response, the glow-worms dim or blink out, but bounce back within about an hour and a half. Bright-yellow pixels, on the other hand, are a “population-wide startle response” to noise: perhaps a boat nudging the wall, or too-loud chatter. “The guides ask the visitors to stay quiet, but it’s impossible,” says Merritt. “Obviously, you can’t stop a baby from crying.” Merritt finds this picture reassuring. After each fright, he points out, the glow-worms recover quickly. And their population has held steady since a crash in the 1970s. He concludes the insects are only “slightly perturbed” by the hundreds of thousands of visitors they endure each year. Merritt quietly enjoys the fact that the tours, for logistical reasons, knock off right when the glow-worms, driven by their body clocks, are peaking. “They’re left alone and they do their own thing,” he says.
In our cover story last issue, we outlined the many threats facing our fur seal colonies. While most populations are stable or growing—for now—a new paper shows that all along the West Coast, birth rates are plummeting. At Wekakura Point, Cape Foulwind, and Taumaka Island, pup numbers have dropped by 83 per cent, 71 per cent, and 61 per cent respectively since the 1990s. “There’s a widely held view that fur seals are doing okay,” says the Department of Conservation’s Don Neale. “But these results show quite the opposite, at least for the West Coast.” We know this only because of 34 years of dedicated monitoring by DOC scientists and mana whenua: annual or biennial trips to these remote locations, often by helicopter, to mark and recount pups. “It’s the longest continuous monitoring of fur seal populations anywhere in the country.” The study began in the 1990s because of concerns about high seal bycatch in the West Coast hoki fishery; that could still play a role in the decline, but so could climate change and disease. The past five years have seen record marine heatwaves in the Tasman Sea, and DOC staff are currently testing the Cape Foulwind colony for the presence of the new canine distemper virus recently identified in the Kaikōura seals. “It’s like a big jigsaw,” Neale says. Whatever the cause, the trend line is a wake-up call, he says. “Fur seals are a high-level predator, and a dominant species on the West Coast. So they’re probably quite a good indicator of the marine environment and the health of it.”
Waiapu River, a treasure of Ngāti Porou, is now known, too, for its volatility. After decades of forestry thrashing the land, every major storm pushes silt and pine slash downriver to the people and beaches of Tairāwhiti. This image, showing where the river meets the coast at Gisborne, is based on aerial LiDAR data collected between 2018 and 2020—three years before Cyclone Gabrielle. It was created by US cartographer Daniel Coe, who became fascinated by rivers via kayaking, and has now mapped hundreds of them worldwide. His work strips away vegetation, buildings and even water, tracing instead the ghost channels of each river’s past. The green is purely an aesthetic choice, he says. The gradient of colour is what matters: it depicts elevation, so the deepest river channels are bright white. And the small puffs of green along the coastline? Those are likely to be minor drainage points, Coe says, where yet more sediment is heading out to sea.
A dispatch from Suva, where cruel epidemics are racing in parallel.
In the studio with textile artist Rowan Panther
A diabolical gamemaker scatters 85 flags across the Pisa Range. He assigns each flag a certain number of points. Some are buried in brambles, others hidden in gorges. Some, fiendishly, will lead you away from fresh water. You have 24 hours, and a map. Go.
“A dead fish is a dead fish.” That’s the key finding of a recent study on the scavenging habits of our native crayfish, led by Calum MacNeil, a freshwater and invasion ecologist at Cawthron Institute. Kōura detect predators, such as eels, in the water through chemical cues. They can also tell when a predator is dead—which, to kōura, means food. The freshwater crays are far better at picking up on the cues of native predators than they are introduced ones, though. MacNeil thought they might be wary about approaching the carcass of something like a trout or a catfish. Catfish populations have exploded in the central North Island, and kōura have crashed as a result. In a bid to control the problem, more than 180,000 catfish have been removed from lakes in the Rotorua district alone. The fish were mostly buried, which to MacNeil seemed like “a lot of protein... going to waste”. Perhaps, he thought, kōura could benefit from this carnage. He and his colleagues experimented with kōura in tanks to see if they would eat a dead catfish as readily as they would a native eel. Kōura, it turns out, aren’t fussy, or fearful. “They’re not like, ‘What’s that fish that’s in my tank?’” says MacNeil. “It’s like, ‘That’s a dead fish. I’m going to eat that dead fish.’ There wasn’t any hesitation.” The findings, MacNeil says, could be useful in the nascent kōura farming industry. Perhaps we could be getting rid of catfish and growing fat kōura at the same time. “It’s one way the native can use the invader.”
First came the kina, hordes of them taking down kelp forests in shallow waters. But they were a warm-up act. Now, on the deeper reefs, a much bigger, hungrier urchin is going rogue—and once it’s eaten everything that lives on the reef, it starts scraping away at the reef itself.
Anyone who’s camped in pūkeko country knows they make a heck of a lot of noise. Now, researchers led by a team from the University of Konstanz in Germany have discovered that the birds’ language also has a “sophisticated and structured” logic to it. The team analysed thousands of recordings of the birds’ raucous breeding season at Tāwharanui Regional Park, and isolated 13 sounds that were often strung together, especially during “yelling bouts”. The birds tend to warm up with, say, a brr, tut or buzz and move into a scream or a snort before the finale, a bup, squeek, brumm or drr. It’s the first time such a system has been found in the avian world outside of songbirds, says Kristal Cain, a University of Auckland biologist who helped with the work. Cain says that until now, scientists haven’t taken a lot of notice of pūkeko calls, and we don’t yet know whether the birds are just burbling away—or combining the sounds to convey meaning, as do humans, songbirds and animals such as whales, chimps and bats. For a long time, she points out, humans assumed we were the only ones capable of such sophisticated speech.
In the battle against this country’s rivers of poo, the dung beetle is a potentially powerful weapon and Shaun Forgie is a one-man army. But he’s been fighting for decades and he’s running out of both money and patience.
Up to six trillion climate change-fighting microbes inhabit each square metre of tree bark, according to a new study by scientists at Australia’s Monash and Southern Cross universities. The paper, published in Science, samples eight species of Australian tree and finds that not only is the bark teeming with life, but those microbes are “air eaters”, processing gases such as carbon monoxide and methane. One finding stands out: Microbes on bark are especially good at sucking up hydrogen. The scientists calculate that each year, the “barkosphere” pulls up to 55 million tonnes of the gas from the atmosphere. It’s the sheer amount of bark already in the world that makes this discovery so significant: strip all the trees in existence and their bark would cloak the whole planet. Now, there is a suggestion that the most efficient types of microbe could be scaled up by strategically planting their host trees and used in the race to try to rebalance our climate. Luke Jeffrey, who co-led the work, says that when he looks at a tree now, he thinks of all those “tiny microbes... quietly helping filter and shape our atmosphere in more ways than we ever realised.”
The barbecue has been an integral part of New Zealand social life for—well, not that long, actually.
Black-backed gulls, their messy city lives, and the people entangled with them.
Mariah Blake, Penguin Random House
Oxygen shaped the world as we know it. It’s why we hiccup and why frogs croak. It’s so good that some turtles have learned to suck it in using not just their nose and mouth, but also… another orifice.
Kelsey Waghorn, HarperCollins
Flora Feltham wrote an early version of our cover story when she was living on Wellington’s predator-free reserve Mana Island with her husband, then a DOC ranger. The couple spent two years on the island, often alone, spanning Feltham’s first pregnancy and 10 months of their baby’s life. An incredible honour, she says, but it had its challenges—weather that would strand them on-island; the need to maintain a stockpile of nappies. Mana is home to rowi, our rarest kiwi. “They would be going off at night and I’d be like, ‘Ssssh! You’re going to wake the baby!’” There is also a colony of black-backed gulls on the island. They do not feature in her story: Feltham made the mistake of getting too close during breeding season and the birds made their displeasure extremely clear. “I never visited again,” she says.
Put a drone up and any self-respecting black-backed gull in the vicinity will be there within moments, pecking and hollering and generally bullying the strange, buzzing interloper. “Black-backs are always the hardest,” says oceans photographer Richard Robinson—he’s been 12 miles off the coast, he says, with no birds in sight, but as soon as the drone goes up, “there’ll be a black-back on it almost immediately”. So when we asked him to document the gulls at Wellington’s Southern Landfill, he knew aerials would be a battle. As our cover story explains (page 34), the tip is a buffet for hundreds of black-backed gulls; every time Robinson attempted to fly his drone, he’d get only a metre or so before the birds rose as one to protect their patch. He called the office, despairing. Brace for no aerials, he warned us. But he persevered, backing way off, waiting for the gulls to momentarily settle, then whisking the drone up at top speed. “Got the shot, and down before they spotted it,” he says. And got a selfie for good measure on the way back down.
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