This creature is so old it defies imagination. Its genome is far more complex than ours—big enough to crash one of the country’s most powerful supercomputers. Will we lose the species before we glimpse the ancient stories it has to tell?
Something is nibbling at the heart of our ecosystems. As possums, rats and stoats disappear thanks to Predator Free 2050 operations, mouse numbers are expected to climb. Are we prepared? And since mice eat our wētā, beetles, geckos and skinks—rather than our charismatic birds—do we care enough to do anything about it?
Plant sex is the ultimate form of a long-distance relationship, with animals co-opted into carrying out the act. The result: much of life on Earth depends on the habits of hungry insects, bats, reptiles and birds. But we don’t know exactly who’s doing what to whom, and when—and what might happen if they disappear.
Many of our skinks and geckos are so new to science that they don’t even have names. Much of what we do know about our lizards is thanks to an amateur herpetologist from Invercargill with no academic training.
Giant carnivorous land snails don’t ask for much: moist leaf litter to burrow into, earthworms to suck up like spaghetti. But if the lower layer of the forest is nibbled away, if sunlight reaches the soil, and if one month of drought follows another, molluscs relying on damp homes struggle to survive.
Zip, pip, chuck, goes the call of Aotearoa’s smallest bird. It may turn out to be one of the earliest forms of language.
For palaeontologists, the dark diatomite layers of Foulden Maar are like the shelves of a great library. Outside that library, bulldozers wait.
A nondescript field in Cromwell is the world’s first—and only—nature reserve dedicated to the protection of an invertebrate.
Lampreys have done without bones—even jaws—for 360 million years, making do instead with a mouthful of rasps designed for shredding. But those teeth are no match for a new and invisible enemy. Are pesticides killing the lampreys? Scientists are scrambling to find out.
A proposal by Australian-based Bathurst Resources to strip-mine a swathe of conservation land inland of Westport, on the West Coast of the South Island, has once again sparked a clash of cultural priorities. Should the ecological and landscape values of the plateau—a dramatic combination of rock, wetland, subalpine forest and tussock—be jeopardised for the economic benefits of extracting the coal that lies beneath? And should a country that trades on its green image be in the business of mining the planet’s most environmentally unfriendly fuel?
Moths can be regarded as a domestic inconvenience. They spin in awkward orbits about lamps, invade our cereal, snack on our woollens. But look closer; theirs is a remarkable world of gluttony, dramatic transformations, mind-bending scents and wild sex.
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If you think these colourful oddities might be more at home in a pet shop, you’d be right. People find such rarities desirable and attractive, and so we perpetuate colour abnormalities by selectively breeding for them in captivity—everything from goldfish and blue budgies (wild budgies are green) to white mice and Irish red setters. In the wild, however, natural colour abnormalities are a rare phenomenon, seldom surviving long enough to breed and pass on their genes. Unable to be fully expressed, these genetic colour abnormalities lie latent inside normal-coloured hosts until the environment changes and a new opportunity presents itself. Only then might a new colour offer advantages in the struggle to survive.
New Zealand hosts the longest-lived geckos on the planet and was once home to the largest, the kawekaweau of Maori folklore. And as we learn more about our geckos with every study, the stranger and more extraordinary they appear.
In the South Island’s remote subalpine regions, a highly terrestrial songbird—one of two surviving species of New Zealand wren—has hopped, chirped and flown in the face of extinction.
What is a brightly coloured parakeet whose nearest ancestors live in the tropics, doing in the company of penguins in the subantarctic? Kakariki, New Zealand’s endemic parakeets, break all the rules.
The last mainland kakapo were found in this damp and secluded Fiordland valley in the 1970s, but recently a slew of other new animals has been discovered in its upper reaches. This photograph was taken after rain during the search for kakapo.
It's an ant! It's a spider. No—it's BATFLY! A blind, wingless species of fly that lives on and with New Zealand short-tailed bats in strange symbiotic relationship. Similar animals infesting bats in South America and elsewhere are blood-sucking parasites—the vampire's vampire—but the New Zealand version is a vegetarian coprophage specialising in the management of bat guano.
The fury of southern South Island seas is a daily hazard for the hoiho, or yellow-eyed penguin—a plucky bird which has become a New Zealand conservation icon. Although, like humans, the birds often seem hesitant to take the plunge, their food lies far out to sea and it takes extreme conditions to keep them ashore—and hungry—for the day. Despite valiant efforts to stabilise the dwindling numbers of birds over the past 15 years, hoiho remain at risk around southern coasts.
In a land renowned for its unusual birds, the kākāpō—a giant flightless nocturnal parrot with a bizarre breeding system—has to be one of the strangest. Although it has been lingering perilously close to extinction for the past half century, there is renewed hope that this icon of conservation effort has a future after all.
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