The lacemaker
In the studio with textile artist Rowan Panther
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Fur seals on the rocks
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.”
Every breath you take
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.
Silent Spring
Last year, they were hit with a deadly virus. The year before that, starvation. What will this breeding season bring for the thousands of fur seals hauled up on our coasts?
Risk and reward
Outdoor education is at a crossroads.
The track makers
Moa once walked all over Aotearoa, pressing heavy feet into mud and sand. Eons later, finding just one of these footprints intact is a small miracle—a fossil that speaks to a movement, a moment in time.
Open wide...
Teeth are extreme: they evolved at roughly the same time as bones, and they’re the hardest thing in the human body. So why are our choppers so sensitive—and expensive?
Case Studies: A Story of Plant Travel
Felicity Jones and Mark Smith, Massey University Press, $85, October 9
Devilfish!
Man versus beast, in a public swimming pool.
Trail blazers
A new book showcases the dust and drama of mountain biking in New Zealand.
Hostile takeover
Need a mobile home? An incubation chamber? Dinner? Hundreds of species have hit on an elegant solution: find a nice juicy critter—and turn it into a zombie.
Fossil Treasures of the Geology Museum
Daniel B Thomas, Jeffrey H Robinson, Daphne E Lee, The University of Otago
Not all cats
In New Zealand’s national parks and remote areas, conservation managers cull feral cats to save many bird, reptile and invertebrate lives. That’s not possible in urban nature reserves, where there’s a risk of extinguishing someone’s beloved pet. But these refuges are often significant habitats for bitterns, crakes, fernbirds, dotterels, penguins and kiwi—native birds that cats scare from their nests, or dismember and proudly display on doormats. Searching for solutions, Manaaki Whenua/Landcare Research ecologist Sze-Wing Yiu and her colleagues set up camera traps over summer in six reserves—two each in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. It was a first step to see what neighbourhood cats were getting up to. They found that while lots of cats visited the reserves—40 snapped camera-trap selfies in Wellington’s northern Miramar Peninsula, for instance—not all of them are killers. In fact, just two individuals were responsible for the four unequivocal kills observed during the study. One cat played for 25 minutes with a pārera, or native grey duck, in Styx Mill Conservation Reserve, Christchurch. And at West Auckland’s Harbourview-Orangihina Park, the cat pictured here—which appears to have a collar—carried off three pūkeko chicks one after the other (in broad daylight, implying that keeping cats indoors at night doesn’t necessarily save birds). Then there was the cat that liked to walk at low tide around the predator-proof fence at the Omaha Shorebird Sanctuary, north of Auckland, to visit dotterel nests. The cameras didn’t capture any violence, but the nosy-parker freaked out the dotterel parents: the five monitored nests it visited all failed. In theory, such feline outliers are actually good news, says Yiu—identifying and managing a few serial-killer individuals is probably more practical and socially acceptable than widespread control. (So far, for instance, it’s proven difficult to convince New Zealanders to keep their cats indoors; see ‘Our love affair with cats’, Issue 167.) Yiu believes the Green Party’s proposed new law requiring cats be registered and microchipped is a crucial next step. This study, she notes, is part of a wider project investigating whether cats can be deterred by recorded sounds, such as human voices or dogs barking. “Change is totally possible,” Yiu says. “We just need to push people to try new things.”
Geology of Karioi Volcano, Aotearoa New Zealand: Geological Map
OE McLeod with RM Briggs, CE Conway and O Ishizuka Geoscience Society of New Zealand, $75
Even by orchid standards, this new native species is exceedingly elegant
Orchids are everywhere. New Zealand has well over 100 species; worldwide there are tens of thousands. “The only places where you don’t see orchids are in the Earth’s deserts and Antarctica,” says Carlos Lehnebach, an orchid botanist at Te Papa. Also, we’re obsessed with them. “There are a lot of people who are nutty about orchids,” says Lehnebach’s colleague, evolutionary biologist Lara Shepherd. We love their vast range of flower colours and shapes, their collectability, and their bizarre pollination strategies (a whiff of carrion, anyone?) Yet orchids can still surprise us. In December 2020, when Shepherd sent Lehnebach a photo of a common leek orchid she’d found in Taranaki, he thought, “Woah, that’s a weirdo orchid.” Closer inspection—and Shepherd’s DNA analysis of a tiny chunk of leaf—revealed it was an entirely different species. “The sepals and petals are longer and more elegant, and it’s a slender plant,” he says. “The common leek orchid is a little bit chunkier, stockier, and the petals are shorter.” To fully describe the species, the scientists combed through dried herbarium specimens, century-old accounts from naturalists, and the intricate drawings of Bruce Irwin, a botanical illustrator and orchid lover who died in 2012. (His sketch at right was originally made in pencil; we’ve colourised it.) The diversity of the native leek orchids hadn’t escaped Irwin; he described this one as “slender and elegant”. In a nod to him, Lehnebach and Shepherd named their new weirdo Prasophyllum elegantissimum, or the extremely elegant leek orchid. Does that make the common leek orchid graceless, next to its supermodel cousin? Lehnebach is loath to fat-shame any organism, he says. “It does make you think about why thin is associated with elegance.” The new species is widespread—it’s been found from the Central North Island to Otago—but also rare, making up a tiny percentage of leek orchid specimens and iNaturalist records. “It has a preference for wetlands,” says Shepherd, “and New Zealand wetlands are so screwed up.” More discoveries are coming. The pair are working through a list of 20 more potentially new native orchid species. But it’ll take years. “There aren’t enough botanists in the country, and it takes a lot of effort to formally describe a species,” says Lehnebach.
The new global superpower? Seaweed.
Solutions to some of our most pressing problems have been waving at us from under the sea, all along.
The plant hunter
For Jay Kuethe, there’s just something about Passiflora.
In an apocalypse, bet on tree ferns
For all their showiness, tree ferns are extraordinary survivors. They hold their secrets close—but now, scientists are finding new ways to unfurl them.
Tails, you win
The enviable upsides of having something sticking out of your backside.
Not a fan
Our summers are getting hotter, but electric fans are not always the answer—even if they make you feel cooler. Electric fans work by blowing cooler air across our skin and enhancing the evaporation of our sweat. Cheap and convenient, they often sell out in heatwaves. But on really hot days, a fan can flip from saviour to sauna—more convection oven than a breath of fresh air. So where is that threshold? Public health bodies have advised that older people—who sweat less, and are more vulnerable to heat—shouldn’t rely on fans when it’s hotter than 35 degrees Celsius. Modelling by one group of scientists suggests the limit is 33 degrees, while another model spat out 38 degrees—a pretty significant divergence. Fergus O’Connor, an Australian environmental physiologist at Queensland’s Griffith University, and his colleagues decided to test this question in the lab. They convinced 18 people aged between 65 and 85 to swelter in a 36-degree room for eight hours under three conditions—no fan, a fan on low, and a fan on high. The fan was placed a metre away, blowing directly on their skin (too ruffly to read a newspaper or magazine, but the volunteers were allowed Netflix and e-readers). During all of the tests, the subjects’ body temperatures spiked to a mean of 38.3 degrees. “The fan had no benefit whatsoever,” says O’Connor—though it didn’t make things worse, either. Under the highest setting, blowing at four metres per second, subjects reported feeling slightly cooler, but their body heated up regardless. O’Connor’s team haven’t yet tested the fans under other temperatures. But he advises that when the mercury rises past 33 degrees or so, you’re better to find an air-conditioned public space—perhaps your local library—rather than rely on a fan.
