Barely seven per cent of New Zealand is land. The rest of it, the wet bit, covers four million square kilometres. In 2016, photographer Richard Robinson won a Canon Personal Project Grant that enabled a dozen expeditions into this vast marine prairie, arguably the country’s last great tract of undisturbed wilderness.
Richard Robinson is an award-winning photojournalist. With a 20-year career in magazines and newspapers, he has captured some of the most memorable images of this country’s biggest news and sporting events. Using his talents to highlight the plights of our Ocean’s he gives voice to our endangered species and is known for his unique and haunting images of life below the waterline.
An unlikely crew is given the assignment of catching birds in butterfly nets on a weather-beaten subantarctic island.
Across the world, ecosystems have been transformed by the mass extinctions that followed the arrival of humans. In New Zealand, the moa, the world’s largest eagle, sea lions, elephant seals and whales were wiped from the register at lightning speed. How did our megafauna become reduced to lawn ornaments?
No one knew that Kaikōura was home to the world’s only alpine-dwelling seabird until an amateur ornithologist following a rumour discovered its burrows high in the mountains. As the bizarre attributes and tenuous existence of the Hutton’s shearwater slowly came to light, Kaikōura took up the mantle of protecting its local bird—just in time to witness the destruction of its breeding grounds in the November 2016 earthquake.
Like New Zealanders, penguins occupy the margin of land and sea, being dependent on both habitats, and vulnerable to changes in either as well. Their fate is wedded to our coasts, and as scientists have begun to understand, they are a perfect indicator of the health of this fragile boundary too. What can penguins tell us about our seas and shores?
They strand on our shores in greater numbers than any other species of whale. Scientists believe they know why, but there is much about these animals that remains an enigma, and the strandings continue to happen.
The migration of Oceania's humpback whales, and their final destination in Antarctica, has remained shrouded in mystery. This year, a team of scientists travelled north to intercept and track the whales travelling south. What they discovered only made the great migration more intriguing.
New Zealand sea-lion numbers have plummeted. Is it fishing pressure, climate change, the mysterious disappearance of octopuses, or a deadly new virus?
Great Mercury was one of the first sites of human habitation in New Zealand. Last year, a radical new public-private partnership sought to rid the island of pests. It was a unique operation, and the results have been astonishing.
New Zealanders love their native galaxiids—sandwiched between two pieces of white bread for the most part. What most people don’t realise is that whitebait are actually the juvenile of a spectacular family of native fish, a group of species as unique as our kiwi, kakapō and kereru, only far less visible. And just as we are getting to know our galaxiids, we are driving them towards extinction.
Built for acceleration and power, the shortfin mako is the fastest shark in the world and an icon of New Zealand seas. Although heavily fished for decades by commercial longliners, mako populations are beginning to recover, and prospects look good for this oceanic speedster.
The distant and remote Minerva Reefs—the closest coral atolls to New Zealand—have been the subject of political intrigue, a failed libertarian state and a naval showdown. Scientists believe they may also be the origin of some tropical species reaching New Zealand’s northern waters.
Invasive koi carp now writhe through wetlands from Auckland to Marlborough, displacing native species and destroying freshwater habitats. For 25 years, bowhunters in Waikato have ministered their own brand of pest control, the World Koi Carp Classic, resulting in prizes, and 70 tonnes of puréed fish.
Inside the many minds of the octopus.
“The sea has all our dreams,” writes Keri Hulme. For some, those dreams are of strange and wonderful creatures, such as you might find 70 metres below the surface at the Poor Knights Islands. For others, the dreams are of the ocean’s untapped riches: minerals, fossil fuels, sea creatures, energy. Which dreams will prevail in 21st-century Aotearoa?
A former editor recalls how he was smitten by deceptively simple creatures.
Swept by the cold seas of the Southern Ocean, New Zealand’s outposts of the Bounty and Antipodes Islands are awash with life.
The Biblical tale of three magi with gifts has an ecological equivalent at the Three Kings Islands, 53 kilometres north of the New Zealand mainland. There, swept by the cool waters of the Tasman Sea, life springs in profusion. This year, five agencies voyaged to the islands to explore this unfathomable biological wealth.
The pacific supports the last great stock of highly migratory blue sharks, the endurance athletes of the oceans. But it's also the location of the world's largest longline fishery, which lands as many blue sharks as some species of tuna. what will become of the blue shark?
After centuries of whaling that nearly silenced the song of humpbacks, the singing giants are making a steady recovery in most places. Yet the population of the South Pacific that was hardest hit by Soviet whaling in Antarctica remains endangered, numbering fewer than 4000 individuals.
Thanks, you're good to go!
Thanks, you're good to go!
Ask your librarian to subscribe to this service next year. Alternatively, use a home network and buy a digital subscription—just $1/week...
Subscribe to our free newsletter for news and prizes
