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Science & Environment

Jellyfish

Drifting at any depth in all the world’s oceans, these creatures range from an Arctic species with a bell the size of a car, to a venomous microscopic Australian. Carnivorous predators, jellyfish swarm around our coasts and litter our beaches, yet we know surprisingly little about them. Some of the most recognisable species don’t even qualify as true jellyfish. One such, a Portuguese Man of War (Physalia physalis), its inflated bladder keeping it poised at the surface, is not even a single animal, but a sizeable colony containing four types of minute, highly modified polyps.

Magazine

ISSUE 102

Mar - Apr 2010

Tasman Solo

Wild pines

Jellyfish

Farming

Circus

Chew Chong

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Editorial

EDITORIAL

Land— stuff to be owned, tilled, trusted. Sea—frighten­ing and inconsistent, a realm to be plundered but never tamed. Issue 102 seems to bear out these prejudices. On January 20, Shaun Quincey rowed out from Coff’s Harbour in New South Wales and into the Tasman Sea, a body of water which his father, Colin, had first rowed solo in 1977. But despite great advanc­es in navigation and forecasting between these attempts, any blue-water voyage is a journey into the unknown. Quincey en­countered a storm front within days and was buffeted and beaten, almost into submis­sion. “Honestly, if Dad hadn’t already rowed this, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible,” he says in this issue. Even as this magazine goes to print, Quincey is still out there, battling the odds and the weather, inching ever closer to his goal, stroke by stroke. For centuries, the sea has been con­sidered a bottomless pit, a rich pan­try for plunder on the one hand and a desolate void on the other. Either way, the beguiling reflections on the surface draw a veil over the goings-on beneath. New Zealand’s endemic jellyfish are a case in point. Writer Margo White and art director Andrew Caldwell worked closely with world-leading jellyfish taxonomist Lisa Gershwin to put together the feature in this issue. So little is known of our species that every other photograph submitted by contributors offered a surprise—jellyfish of forms not known to exist here, jellyfish with colorations not matching their scientific descrip­tion, and jellyfish that were completely unidentifiable. But if the seas are a mystery, the land has been tamed, tortured even. In the feature on Canterbury, Matt Philp describes the mechanisation of the modern farm—robotic milking sheds, combine harvesters that increase pro­ductivity four-fold, and irrigators that can tend nearly a square kilometre at a time—a far cry from the early dairy farming described in the feature on the Taranaki pioneer Chew Chong. But progressive decisions made with the best of intentions today may not serve us well in the future. Dave Hans-ford looks back to the 1950s, when Pi­nus contorta seeds were dumped by the plane-load over the country to control erosion. Wilding pines are now spread­ing rapidly and conservation groups are devising increasingly sophisticated and daring methods to control them, includ­ing swinging from a 15 m chain beneath a screaming helicopter with a chainsaw between the legs. Talk about putting your life on the line—only Shaun Quincey may be able to empathise.

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Geography

Solo

Waves surrendered their foaming crests to the sky, sheared off and carried in the wind to hammer against the hull of the small boat like nails tossed from a speeding car. The crackling surface seethed and thrashed at the gunwales, licked the scuppers, and water lobbed into the cockpit.
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Living World

Circus; A world of upside down, of big stacked on small

Circus is a kind of magic, arrived at by blood, sweat and tears. You sense the magic the moment you step off Christchurch’s noisy Moorhouse Avenue and into the hall that houses CircoArts, a two year diploma programme at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology that prepares its students for a career under the Big Top.
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Science & Environment

Wilding pines

Pinus contorta, a native conifer of North America, was deliberately seeded through swathes of high country and conservation estate as a counter-measure to erosion. These rugged self-seeding trees and other stray exotics now infest hundreds of thousands of hectares throughout the country.

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Living World

The merchant of Taranaki

In a climate of fanatical anti-Chinese sentiment, Chew Chong saved the bacon of Taranaki pioneer farmers, contributed significantly to New Zealand’s dairy industry, and was acknowledged for it in his lifetime.
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Science & Environment

Twilight of Idyll

Modern agriculture’s rhythms are urgent, its scale corporate. Driving across the Canterbury plains today there are futuristic grain research stations, slick billboards promoting yield-boosting technologies, and the now-ubiquitous centre-pivot irrigators that extend 500 metres like pylons brought to earth.

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