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Riders on the storm

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.
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Tying the forest together

This is one plant you won’t find in a glossy coffee-table book on the 100 prettiest native species for the garden. Supplejack is a climber that inhabits the deep, dark, shadowy gullies of our native bush. In Māori legend, supplejack is said to have sprouted from the bloody tip of the tail of the taniwha Tunaroa, whom Māui hacked to pieces and tossed far and wide into the bush for molesting his wife Raukura. Supplejack vines grow from a bulb the size of a man’s fist, their long glossy black strands about the thickness of a finger, with a knuckle at each node like bamboo. The vine wraps itself around the limbs of saplings and forest giants alike, sometimes even dragging them to the forest floor. Like many aka (vines), supplejack is regarded as a nuisance: an impenetrable tangle that strangles the life out of regenerating bush and stops trampers in their tracks. Little wonder it was known as “taihoa” or “wait-a-while” by Pākehā bushmen. But supplejack had an extraordinary range of uses. The vine’s leaves, young shoots and roots were made into medicinal tonics to treat everything from sore throats to chronic rheumatism, recorded Murdoch Riley in Māori Healing and Herbal. Pākehā and Māori used supplejack laced between a couple of saplings to make a stretcher to carry the wounded out of the bush, or to create a bed sprung with a latticework of vines. A bundle of tightly bound vines made a good torch. Set alight, the vines could also be used to cauterise wounds. Cut into slivers and boiled to extract the juice, the vines could produce a “wonderful beer; clear, gold and heady”, according to Riley. Boys built bows from supplejack. Schoolmasters used supplejack canes to discipline lads who misbehaved. In 1906, ethnographer Elsdon Best noted hoops of supplejack poked into the ground and lashed together to support the weight of a young child learning to walk. Supplejack was used to make all sorts of ingenious fishing devices, traps, nets and scoops. Stiff, springy hoops of vine were used to hold open the mouths of scoop nets or to strengthen and reinforce fish traps, hīnaki (eel nets) and bag nets. Many Ngāi Tahu whānau still remember cutting supplejack vines from the bush and building tāruke (crayfish pots) in the mid-1900s. In latter years, the designers improvised with hybrid designs, lacing supplejack hoops together with No. 8 wire. They weighted their pots with concrete or scrap iron donated by New Zealand Railways. Tāruke had significant advantages over the steel-framed, wire-netting-clad pots that eventually replaced them; they didn’t rust and were durable and flexible enough to withstand perhaps a decade of the worst storms Tangaroa could throw at them. Excerpted from Treasures of Tāne: Plants of Ngāi Tahu by Rob Tipa (Huia Press).
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Step away from the kākāpō

The 2019 kākāpō breeding season was the best in the 26-year history of the recovery programme. But it was also the worst: the fungal disease aspergillosis hit the Codfish Island/Whenua Hou sanctuary, infecting 21 kākāpō and killing nine—all either nesting females, chicks or juveniles. New fungal genome analysis shows the birds all caught the same strain—and it probably came in with people, most likely on supplementary food. That is surprising, says University of Otago geneticist Peter Dearden, but “we can’t explain it unless it’s been carried by humans”. The same strain of aspergillosis was also identified on Anchor Island in Fiordland, home to a smaller kākāpō breeding population. But the birds there didn’t get sick. [caption id="attachment_472574" align="alignnone" width="600"] Kākāpō Huhū’s results show the shadow of the fungus, though the bird survived.[/caption] Other factors such as climate change are likely in play. “It was a very hot, dry summer in 2019,” says Andrew Digby, the science adviser for DOC’s recovery programme, who was involved in the research. “All the infections occurred over quite a narrow time period, and it might be that the climatic conditions were [right on Whenua Hou] at the same time as chicks were at their most vulnerable stage.” All islands where kākāpō breed are subject to strict quarantine and hygiene procedures, but the team have now put in additional measures such as freezing supplementary food, ventilating nests and not moving chicks directly between them. They rely more on remote monitoring and have established hands-off breeding sites on Te Kākahu-o-Tamatea/Chalky Island in Fiordland. “That’s how we want to be managing kākāpō in the future,” Digby says. “It’s not to say the intense management is wrong. Without it, kākāpō would be virtually extinct by now. But it’s another reason why it’s important that we step back.”
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Teaching drones to soar like birds

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).

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State of cray

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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Minister’s decision found “unlawful”

The NGO Environmental Law Initiative (ELI) took the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries to the High Court in October, challenging the decision on the total allowable catch of crayfish in Northland. (As part of a no-holds-barred commitment to oceans journalism, New Zealand Geographic was involved in preparing and presenting the case.) ELI contended that the advice to the minister was “inaccurate, misleading, and unsupported by peer-reviewed and published literature”, and that the minister had failed to consider the “interdependence of species” in the marine environment that ultimately leads to trophic collapse—the kina barrens that New Zealand Geographic reported on in November 2021. The court found that the fisheries decisions were “unlawful” and ordered Minister David Parker to remake the decision based on best-available information, considering the wider impacts of rock-lobster fishing and taking a precautionary approach. This sets a precedent for other decisions and may accelerate an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management that has long been proposed by those concerned about environmental impacts of human activity in the seas.
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Was Haast’s eagle bald?

New Zealand’s extinct Haast’s eagle may have hunted like an eagle, but it feasted on guts and organs like a vulture, according to new research. The giant bird of prey’s beak and talons closely resemble those of living eagles, while its skull is more alike to the Andean condor, a type of vulture. This finding suggests that Haast’s eagle may have had the featherless head typical of vultures—which aligns with a Māori rock painting of an eagle with a black body but an uncoloured head and neck.
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Colourful catch-22

Nearly 500 songbird species have been flagged as targets for wildlife poachers thanks to their unique plumage. Among them are three New Zealand species: the popokōtea/whitehead, mohua/yellowhead, and kōkako. Like their parrot cousins, songbirds garbed in eye-catching colour palettes attract more human admiration. But bright colouration is a double-edged sword: it also makes birds highly sought after in the pet trade. In turn, this means that populations dwindle as poachers snaffle birds from the wild—a fate that currently befalls around 30 per cent of songbirds, especially in the tropics. Colourful birds in the “perching bird” (passerine) family are more likely to be both traded and threatened with extinction, according to a new analysis. Surprisingly, white is a popular hue in captive birds—exemplified by the Bali myna, which tops off its snowy plumage with a crisp black tail-tip and zingy blue eye-liner. The myna is critically endangered due to poaching for the caged-bird market. As populations of desired species decline, poachers shift their efforts to birds with similar qualities. “Most of New Zealand’s birds are not too colourful—although the hihi and kōtare offer obvious exceptions,” says study co-author James Dale from Massey University. Nonetheless, New Zealand is pinpointed as a place that could see a drop in both colour diversity and uniqueness among birds. Without conservation efforts and proactive trading regulations, the future for our feathered friends could be decidedly drab.
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Green light for comets

As comets streak across the night sky, their radiant heads often glow green—but not their long tails. In the 1930s, physicist Gerhard Herzberg suggested that the lime halo may be produced by sunlight destroying diatomic carbon, C2. But because diatomic carbon is so unstable, no one on Earth has been able to test that theory—until now. Researchers in Australia used a vacuum chamber and powerful lasers to simulate the comet environment, proving that the breakdown of C2 produces the emerald hue.
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Superhero snaps

A pivotal scene in the superhero movie Avengers: Infinity War involves one character snapping his fingers while wearing a metal gauntlet. It made biophysicist Saad Bhamla wonder: would it actually be possible to snap your fingers while wearing such a glove? Turns out, no one had explored the physics of the finger snap, so Bhamla and his colleagues at Georgia Tech in the United States filmed a finger snap in ultra-slow motion. The key to a successful finger snap is skin friction, which is partly created by the squishiness of the finger pads. Skin friction builds up energy like a compressed spring, then releases it quickly to fuel rapid motion. During a finger snap, the middle finger rotates about 20 times faster than the blink of a human eye, and when it hits the palm, the impact creates a mini-shockwave, producing that characteristic pop. Researchers failed to snap while wearing slippery gloves or stiff metal thimbles, while bare skin created the perfect amount of friction. The verdict: Thanos’s snap wasn’t possible according to actual physics, but researchers admitted they could not account for the supernatural powers of the gauntlet.
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Plastic Archaeology

If you sail west from California for nearly a week you’ll end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Then the plastic starts bobbing past—a buoy, a bucket, a net, a toothbrush, microplastics floating like bubbles—tens of thousands of tonnes of it spread over an estimated 1.6 million square kilometres.
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Mussel building

One day in 2008, marine science student Kura Paul-Burke was diving in Ōhiwa’s murky waters when the grey-brown of the sea floor suddenly gave way to a brilliant orange. At first, she was struck by the beauty of it. Then she realised she was looking at hundreds of thousands of 11-armed sea stars—pātangaroa, a native species—stacked five or six layers deep. Behind them, the seabed was littered with empty green-lipped mussel shells. In 2007, the Bay of Plenty harbour was home to an estimated 112 million mussels. By 2019, only 78,000 were left. Paul-Burke’s Ngāti Awa elders had noticed signs of decline well before then. No-one knew why the mussels were dying. Was it overharvesting? Sedimentation? But they knew there used to be more mussel beds, and in 2006, they urged her to investigate—then helped her to map the old mussel beds using both traditional landmarks and scuba surveys. Researchers are still confirming the starfish are to blame, and figuring out what is causing the ecosystem imbalance in the harbour. In the meantime, Paul-Burke—now a professor of mātai moana (marine research) at the University of Waikato—wanted to see if it was possible to save the mussels and the harbour. The project wove together four iwi (Ngāti Awa, Te Ūpokorehe, Te Whakatōhea and Waimana Kaakū [Tūhoe]) and three councils, kaumātua and young people (pictured below, L-R: Megan Ranapia, Te Waikamihi Lambert and Cameron Phillips), mātauranga Māori and marine science. Together, they built four restoration stations where baby mussel spat could attach and grow. Instead of using commercial plastic spat lines, they experimented with natural fibres. The strongest were made from fallen tī kōuka leaves woven into rope by master weaver Rokahurihia Ngarimu-Cameron and her students. In late 2018, the team hung them on floats in midwater, out of the reach of clambering starfish. It worked. Mussels began growing in such numbers that they dragged the floats under the surface. When the tī kōuka lines eventually degraded, young mussels fell to the bottom “as a whānau”, Paul-Burke says, before reattaching to the sea floor. As the researchers describe in a new paper, by 2021, three new mussel beds had formed close to the restoration stations, and the mussel population had increased ten-fold—showing what can be accomplished, says Paul-Burke, when several knowledge streams and communities pull together.

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Clicky cliques

Sperm whales are tribal creatures—and they avoid interacting with those from other clans, even when they share the same waters. But how do they identify each other?
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End of the red-and-golden weather

In New Zealand, if you see a tree turning red or golden in autumn, it’s almost certainly exotic. Out of more than 500 native species of woody flowering plants, just 10 lose their leaves in winter—most notably the tree fuchsia, kōtukutuku. But northern hemisphere forests at similar latitudes are full of deciduous trees, and in South America, close relatives of our southern beech trees drop their leaves each year. So why do Aotearoa’s temperate forests stay green, and was it always this way? Geologists examined a hundred fossil leaves from four sites in Otago dating back to the middle Miocene—around 11-16 million years ago—and found multiple lines of evidence that some of our extinct beech species were deciduous. The leaves of several deciduous Chilean beech species appear corrugated, with deeply etched veins, and the scientists found the same patterns in some of the Otago fossils. The leaves were also large, comparatively light for their size, and poorly defended, as evidenced by insect attacks—all trademarks of deciduous trees. (If you’re going to keep your leaves for just six months, it makes sense to make them cheap and disposable.) But here’s the paradox. Otago in the Miocene was much, much warmer than it is today. There were crocodiles and palm trees. If the winters weren’t frigid, why were those ancient beeches shrugging off their leaves every autumn? Lead author Tammo Reichgelt from the University of Connecticut theorises that deciduousness is less about temperature than light. Central Chilean summers are practically cloudless, while westerly winds make winters cloudy and wet. In New Zealand, cloud cover is relatively constant through the year. In Miocene Otago, as in Chile, the beeches soaked up the abundant summer sunshine—“it was really worth it to photosynthesise a lot”, says Reichgelt—but there was little point to keeping green during the dark, wet winter. Then, at the end of the Miocene, the planet cooled dramatically. Zealandia got wetter, its seasons less pronounced. “It wasn’t worth it anymore to throw away your carbon in autumn,” says Reichgelt—so all our deciduous beeches disappeared.
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Star lab

One of the first sights that NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope observed was Stephan’s Quintet, a cluster of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. This picture, the biggest produced by the telescope so far, is a composite of about 1000 images. If you printed it out at its actual size, it would be about 700 kilometres wide. Scientists hope that looking at Stephan’s Quintet this closely will teach us more about how stars are formed by galaxies crashing into or moving past each other. The left-most galaxy, NGC 7320, is nearest to us—40 million lightyears away—and so it appears in the most detail. The other four galaxies are about 290 million lightyears away. One of them, NGC 7318B, is smashing through the centre of the cluster, while the top galaxy, NGC 7319, has a supermassive black hole at its centre that’s 24 million times as big as the sun.
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Cats are unpredictable. Who knew?

Finding patterns in cat behaviour would help us to stop feral cats from chewing their way through native bat roosts and bird life. And so a group of New Zealand researchers pored over 36 studies from around the world in an attempt to understand the size of feral cats’ home range—where they hunt, mate, and nurse their young. “Are there similarities between cats?” they asked. Surprising nobody, the answer is no. The study, published in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology, found no discernible patterns to the cats’ behaviour, even when taking into account the effects of season, habitat type, cat size, and competitor animals. One male cat roamed 3232 hectares, its home range the area of Gisborne. The most adventurous female cat roamed 2078 hectares; another stayed within 10 hectares. As any cat owner might tell you, every feline has a different idea of home.

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Conversations with friends are key to COVID transmission

Most of us think of catching up with friends as a way of showing care. University of Auckland aerosol chemist Joel Rindelaub sees it somewhat differently. What we’re doing, he says, is shooting a stream of dirty particles at their airways. As we speak, thousands of airborne droplets carrying COVID-19 virions catapult from behind his moustache towards me, then bounce off the Zoom window on his computer screen. He tested positive the previous day. Moreover, the risks of COVID transmission through conversation have been underestimated, according to a study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June 2022. In part, this is because of the words used in experiments. Previous studies have relied on participants counting to 10 in English or cheering on a university mascot, such as the University of Maryland’s Testudo the diamondback terrapin. This experiment tested a wider range of words, and researchers discovered the power of “P” to generate large numbers of spit and mucus droplets, thanks to the film formed between the lips and then broken. Meanwhile, vowel sounds produced continuous airstreams—currents which these droplets can float on. Combining these, the researchers identified a highly infectious word: “popeye”. The bawdy sailor’s name generated a burst of droplets followed by a puff of air to propel them. Volunteers pressed their mouths against a 4.5cm tube, which fed into a 100-litre steel chamber, as they repeated words or exhaled. Laser light scattering measured the size and quantity of droplets produced. The researchers found that saying “popeye” into the chamber four times over the course of an hour created 10 times more droplets than a person breathing over the same period of time. They also found that eating a small apple sharply increased the number of expelled particles. Rindelaub put this down to “a lot of salivating, so your mouth is producing a lot of extra particles”. Eating and talking around people who are also eating and talking could be among the most risky activities—and it’s exactly how Rindelaub contracted COVID himself.
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Pets with benefits

Older people who have a canine companion are 50 per cent less likely to have a disability than non-dog-owning people of a similar age, according to a study of more than 11,000 people aged 65 to 84 years. People who own a dog and exercise regularly are even less likely to develop a disability. Adjusting for a range of demographic factors didn’t change the outcome: dog ownership was linked to a lower level of disability as people aged. Cat ownership, on the other hand, was not associated with any difference in disability risk.  
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Sunscreen leads to a false sense of security

People who wear sunscreen are also more likely to get sunburned—an issue for Aotearoa, which tops the world in deaths from melanoma. An international study of global melanoma rates published in JAMA Dermatology in March 2022 found that Australasia has the highest prevalence of these skin cancers, and in New Zealand, they’re most deadly. Researchers forecast a dramatic increase—50 per cent—in melanoma by 2040. Meanwhile, a study published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health in April 2021 found that New Zealanders underestimate the risk of sunburn and are too optimistic about the level of protection that sunscreen provides. People regarding sunscreen as their main—or only—form of protection is the problem, says one of the study’s authors, Otago University senior research fellow Geri McLeod. In addition, a March 2022 report by Consumer found many sunscreens not delivering the protection they promise. Its tests found 13 of 21 sunscreens didn’t meet their SPF label claims. In September 2022, sunscreens will be regulated by a new safety standard, and not meeting it could result in a fine under the Fair Trading Act. But under the new rules, sunscreens will remain classed as cosmetics, so they won’t require regular testing to ensure they make the grade. Consumer NZ and the Cancer Society are calling for more scrutiny, saying sunscreens should instead be classed as therapeutic products under the Medicines Act. So, we may be slopping—but why aren’t we slipping, slapping and wrapping? Bronwen McNoe, who co-directs Otago University’s social and behavioural research unit, says government investment in melanoma prevention is lacking. The government’s Health Promotion Agency (now part of Te Whatu Ora–Health New Zealand) received $500,000 for skin cancer prevention over 2020 and 2021, while Waka Kotahi spent $2.4 million in 2021 on producing and running television and radio advertisements for its Safe Limits road safety campaign. Meanwhile, deaths from melanoma exceed the annual road toll. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, 503 New Zealanders died from skin cancer while 352 died on our roads.
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How did penguins get so great?

Penguins traded in their wings for flippers more than 60 million years ago, long before there were icesheets in Antarctica. But aeons of evolution turned them into supremely adapted marine hunters, capable of diving deep and withstanding extreme cold.

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