The bittern’s eerie, booming call sounds like a lament, a tangi ringing across the marshes. Now, the birds themselves are in trouble.
Ellen Rykers is an award-winning writer curious about all things weird and wonderful. With a background in science, her work has taken her from tropical rainforests to the icy shores of Antarctica. Based north of Auckland, she enjoys crafting compelling yarns about people, wildlife and research from across Aotearoa.
Bangers get a boost in the summertime, researchers analysing 66 years’ worth of UK weekly pop charts have found. They scored more than 23,000 songs on factors such as tempo, danceability and energy, then compared the songs and their rankings with the weather. The result: songs with high intensity, that spark joy and happiness, soared to the top of the pops when the weather was warmer and less rainy. Loud, fast and energetic songs—the kind boosted by summery climes—included the 80s dance bop ‘Get Loose’ by Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King, the early 2000s banger ‘Temperature’ by Sean Paul, and a cover of ‘Ice Ice Baby’ by the cast of the TV show Glee. Songs in the top 10 showed the strongest associations with weather, fluctuating with the seasons. This suggests that it’s not just the quality of a song that propels it to the top of the charts, but also the prevailing weather. The study authors suggest that sunny weather may make people feel happier, leading them to listen to upbeat music to match their mood—but they can’t say for sure, noting that the study only measures correlation. It’s clear that we do, however, like singin’ in the rain: the popularity of low-intensity sad songs did not appear to change when the weather did.
Once upon a time, raucous, stinking colonies of seabirds blanketed huge areas of Aotearoa’s mainland, each burrow and poo and eggshell helping fuel the forests. Those birds are gone now—but a new modelling tool gives a fascinating glimpse of what once was.
Almost two centuries after its discovery, an enigmatic bell is bringing communities together.
Researchers have discovered a potential antidote to death cap mushroom poisoning.
Fish are cold-blooded, meaning they rely on their surroundings to regulate their body temperature. So how do hammerhead sharks—which frequently dive deep to hunt—maintain a constant body temperature when they’re in the frigid depths? Turns out scalloped hammerheads hold their breath. Scientists tracking seven of the sharks off Hawai’i found that the predators likely close their gill slits on deep dives to preserve body heat—the first time this behaviour has been observed in fish. The discovery was “a complete surprise”, according to the study’s lead author, Mark Royer. “Although it is obvious that air-breathing marine mammals hold their breath while diving, we did not expect to see sharks exhibiting similar behaviour.” Across more than 100 deep dives, ranging from 418 to 825 metres beneath the surface, a device similar to a Fitbit recorded what each shark was doing. After a gradual descent, the sharks sharply and swiftly dive down. During that plunge, they can experience an ambient temperature drop of about 20 degrees Celsius. They remain at depth for about four minutes, hunting, before steeply ascending again. Throughout each dive, the shark’s temperature remains constant until part-way through the ascent. Computer modelling suggests that the sharks manage this by closing their gill slits, which are a major source of heat loss—an explanation supported by video footage of a hammerhead swimming at about one kilometre deep with its gills shut.
In the North Pacific off the coast of California, ocean currents and winds concentrate humanity’s detritus in a plastic soup around six times the size of New Zealand. It’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In 2019, a French long-distance swimmer named Benoît Lecomte embarked on an 80-day, 300-nautical-mile swim through the patch. While he mostly ploughed through suspended specks of microplastic, Lecomte also encountered items such as toothbrushes, bottles and fishing nets littering the sea surface. We now suspect life was here well before the plastic arrived: new research suggests that tiny surface-floating organisms such as jelly-like blue buttons, violet sea snails and by-the-wind sailors have long been caught up in the same currents and winds that aggregate the rubbish. Known to wash up on New Zealand beaches, these creatures are called the ‘blue fleet’. Samples collected by Lecomte’s support team revealed that three blue fleet species were more abundant inside the patch than outside. They also found evidence the creatures are reproducing, which suggests the area may play an important role in their life cycles—even though the ecosystem is crowded with man-made obstacles. In another recent study, a different research team identified 484 species of marine invertebrates living—and breeding—on bits of plastic rubbish fished out of the patch in 2018 and 2019. Eighty per cent of the species identified—including crustaceans and sea anemones—usually live in coastal habitats, but had survived the journey, over thousands of miles, to the patch. The researchers suggest this constitutes a new ecological community. Both studies have implications for ocean clean-up efforts, which could disturb surface-dwelling fauna like the blue fleet. For example, the Ocean Cleanup Foundation deploys giant nets to scoop up plastic—and presumably ocean creatures, too.
... and it’s tuatara to blame
Fifteen years ago, a crisis loomed for search and rescue. Two-thirds of volunteers were men over 40, and as the years ticked by, they were going to struggle with the gnarly climbs, river crossings and long days so often required to find those who are lost. But would young people be altruistic enough to step up?
For the first time ever, scientists have recorded the brainwaves of freely moving octopuses—tracking three big blue octopuses (Octopus cyanea) through 12 hours of sleeping, eating, and swimming around a tank. Some of the trio’s brain activity patterns resembled those of mammals. But researchers also identified a long-lasting, slow oscillation that didn’t seem to match any particular behaviour and which they’d never seen before. They think it may represent memory or learning processes. The octopus mind is an intriguing subject for neuroscientists, since the invertebrates display behaviour linked to intelligence—such as tool use, playing, and distinct personalities. Yet, the mollusc and mammal lineages split on the tree of life 1.2 billion years ago, meaning octopus smarts have evolved independently from our own. In addition to its central brain, two-thirds of an octopus’ neurons are located in its arms. It’s these powerful arms that posed a challenge for scientists: “If we tried to attach wires to them, they would immediately rip it off,” says Tamar Gutnick, lead author of the study. Octopuses also lack hard surfaces, such as a skull, to attach electrodes to. So the research team anaesthetised each octopus and surgically inserted a data logger under its skin—out of reach of probing tentacles. Electrodes were slipped into an incision between the eyes, into the brain region thought to be important for visual learning and memory, and once they recovered, the octopuses were filmed going about their octopus business. In future, researchers plan to combine brainwave detection with learning and memory tasks, to further tease out what’s going on in their alien brains.
As climate change sends sea temperatures soaring, our lush underwater forests of kelp are disappearing (see Issue 176, Jul/Aug 2022). Now, University of Otago scientists have homed in on exactly how the heat impacts the microscopic life-cycle stages of New Zealand’s iconic rimurimu giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera). Like a fern, rimurimu reproduces by releasing spores. These then nestle into a crevice and grow into a germ tube, before entering the sexual stage of development. By turning up the heat on rimurimu samples in the lab, scientists found that higher temperatures triggered the release of more spores. But, once released, the hotter conditions led to significant declines in the number of spores settling on a surface and progressing through germination to become germ tubes. The germ tubes were smaller above 19.8 degrees Celsius, too. This research adds to our understanding of kelp’s future, the researchers say, and “aids our attempts to help protect and rebuild it”.
An amateur mathematician has solved a long-standing geometry mystery. David Smith, a “shape hobbyist” from England, was tinkering with cardboard cut-outs of a 13-sided polygon that vaguely resembled a fedora, when he realised he could be looking at an elusive ‘einstein’ shape. The ‘einstein’ (‘one stone’) shape is a two-dimensional tile that can cover an infinite surface without overlaps or gaps, creating a pattern that never repeats. While individual tiles or subdesigns in the “hat” tiling may recur, the tiled surface is like the shape version of the number pi—its sequence never permanently repeats. Smith emailed a mathematician acquaintance, who completed a proof backing the discovery. (Meanwhile, Smith discovered a second ‘einstein’, dubbed the “turtle”. That work has yet to be peer reviewed.) In the 1970s, Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose discovered a set of two tiles, called darts and kites, that can create this ‘aperiodic’ tiling. But whether this type of tessellation could be achieved with a single shape remained unknown, until now. Some have questioned whether the “hat” and “turtle” truly count as single tiles, since the aperiodic pattern relies on mirror images. So far the consensus is that yes, they count as sought-after einsteins, with the non-mirror-image version simply a frontier to be explored.
To an orca, a sunfish is a bit like a watermelon: a nutritious, watery snack, but hard to swallow whole. Also like watermelons, sunfish (also called mola) don’t bite back. This makes them the ideal “training prey” for juvenile orcas, according to New Zealand orca scientist Ingrid Visser. In the first-ever review of orca-sunfish interactions, Visser, along with sunfish researcher Marianne Nyegaard and orca researcher London Fletcher, found several instances of juvenile-parent orca pairs hunting sunfish. About 40 per cent of the dozens of photos, videos and oral accounts they analysed didn’t appear to be about predation, but simply entertainment. Orcas flung sunfish like frisbees, pushed them around underwater, and balanced them on noses in what Visser calls a “mola moustache”. The researchers also found records of orcas extracting a meal of intestinal spaghetti: “It’s like they’ve got a string of sausages in their mouth, pulling them out of the sunfish, which is often still alive and swimming around,” says Visser. “They split the sunfish up like a taco or a pita bread… stick their faces in, and eat the insides out.” One underwater video filmed in New Zealand reveals that sunfish are quick on their fins despite their dinnerplate anatomy. “We thought the orca were pushing the sunfish upside down,” says Nyegaard, “but the mola was thrashing and spinning in crazy manoeuvres all by itself. I thought, ‘What the hell is it doing?!’” The sunfish was attempting to evade the orca by using a suite of sneaky moves, including spinning rapidly, breaching, flipping upside down, or positioning itself with its rigid backside towards the orca’s mouth. “People thought sunfish were just great big blobs and that mola design was cumbersome, but this adds further proof that they’re actually quite good at swimming,” says Visser. “They can breach, their cruise and boost speeds are impressive, and this is more recognition of their agility.”
Your favourite summer surf break may fizzle out by the end of the century as a result of climate change, according to new modelling led by University of Auckland scientist João Albuquerque. Shifting wind patterns will drive slightly bigger west coast waves, while east coast breakers are set to diminish by up to 20 per cent. Seasonal patterns will fluctuate too, with summer and autumn swells smaller than today’s, while winter and spring will see them ramp up. But it’s not just surf forecasts that will flip-flop: wave directions will shift, too. These altered angles of inundation will impact coastal communities, eroding and flooding different parts of the coast. The projected changes remain subtle up to 2045, but are expected to become “more severe” between 2080 and 2100, Albuquerque says.
Antarctic historian David Harrowfield has spent a lifetime collecting—objects, friendships and memories.
In the Antarctic summer of 1972, four young scientists set off on a trimaran from Cape Bird for a quick outing on a clear day. They would spend the next five days stranded at sea, jumping between ice floes that shattered and sank beneath them, risking their lives with every leap.
Hundreds of pest plant species—many of them garden escapees—run rampant in New Zealand’s biggest city. Now, its citizens are fighting back.
In February 2022, Tropical Cyclone Dovi brought weather chaos to New Zealand’s North Island—along with a few unexpected visitors from warmer waters in the South Pacific. Noddys, frigatebirds and a bridled tern were reported from Northland, while a lone tern caught the eye of Hayden Pye, a Massey University doctoral student visiting the Muriwai colony. Colin Miskelly, curator of vertebrates at Te Papa, describes this find as “the pick of the bunch” from the flurry of vagrant sightings. It was New Zealand’s first-ever record of a black-naped tern, usually found frequenting the ocean around New Caledonia. Sadly, the emaciated tern died, but its legacy lives on as a specimen at Auckland Museum, and as a new bird on New Zealand’s official species list.
Flying robots are taking to the skies in greater numbers—performing tasks such as tracking critically endangered Māui dolphins and collecting data on extreme weather events. But they can’t fly well in windy conditions, and don’t have the battery capacity to power long flights. Birds, on the other hand, can wheel and soar in even the most turbulent conditions, exploiting wind energy to fly effortlessly. In a new paper, birds provide inspiration to make drones more adaptable and energy efficient. Researchers suggest mimicking flying strategies such as vultures circling in thermal updrafts (below, D, E), or birds exploiting updrafts created by the likes of cliffs or buildings (F). “Dynamic soaring” strategies seen in gulls, kites and crows could inspire drones programmed to be more reactive to subtler air patterns. These include surfing wind gusts (above, A), sweeping close to the sea surface on the updraft of a long wave (B), or looping in the eddies off the tip of a sharp ridge (C).
The crayfish population in the Hauraki Gulf is in worse shape than official fishery stock assessments suggest, according to a new analysis. Researchers from the University of Auckland used two marine reserves— Cape Rodney-Okakari Point (Goat Island) and Tāwharanui—as “proxies” for natural, unfished crayfish abundance. “We hired a fisherman and all of his gear and we did cray potting inside and outside the marine reserve for two years,” says Benn Hanns, lead author of the paper. Comparing catch rates inside and outside the marine reserves indicates that the crayfish population has plummeted to around two to three per cent of unfished levels—though Hanns suggests the population may be even lower. It’s substantially different from the Ministry for Primary Industries’ estimate of 18 per cent. Under current rules, if a fishery drops below 10 per cent of its original, unfished level, it must be closed. Stock assessments rely heavily on fisheries-dependent data and models with complex, inbuilt assumptions. Hanns says some of these assumptions are outdated. “This research shows the utility of marine reserves beyond conservation… They can actually be these really important sanity-checking tools.” But even within the marine reserves, numbers of crayfish have been declining in recent years. Hanns chalks this up to one big problem: the marine reserves are too small. His research has contributed to a recent proposal to expand Goat Island Marine Reserve, currently under consideration.
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