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Science & Environment

The known unknowns

The recent outbreak of the Delta variant led to a number of unintended consequences. Growers dumped thousands of flowers they weren’t allowed to sell. Auckland factories producing construction materials were shuttered for five weeks. Deaths from influenza are at an all-time low. Now, New Zealand needs to decide how to manage COVID-19, based on incomplete information about its risks. Some of the most crucial metrics are ones we don’t have—such as how many people develop long-term illnesses. This is what we wish we knew.
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Data

How we die

These stream graphs explore how likely a person is to die of different causes at different times in their lives. The top chart shows female New Zealanders and the lower chart represents males. New Zealand’s infant mortality rate is low by global standards (3.8 deaths per 1000 live births in 2018). Nearly half of infant deaths are related to conditions originating during the perinatal period (up to the 28th day after birth). The most common specified causes of infant death are disorders related to short gestation and low birthweight. Between the ages of five and 35 external causes pose the greatest risk. This includes accidents, assaults and self-harm. The trend is more pronounced in males, peaking in their teens and early 20s. From a person’s 30s, cancer and conditions relating to the heart, lungs and respiratory system become more common. Conditions relating to the degradation of mental faculties, such as dementia, are a risk for people who survive beyond their 70s. Take care interpreting these charts, as they show percentages rather than absolute counts. Although the percentage of people dying from cancer declines after the age of 60, the absolute number of cancer deaths keeps climbing. How to read The charts show how many people died of a particular cause as a per cent of all people who died at that age. Coloured strips represent causes of death. People who died young are shown on the left side of the chart while older people are on the right. The percentages are based on 11 years of mortality count records (2006-16).

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Geo News

Night shift

When the sun goes down, the night shift gets to work on our native plants. It’s thought New Zealand’s spectacular array of moths may be providing a hidden service after dark, transferring pollen between flowers. The problem for researchers is that studying the nocturnal behaviour of moths is extremely difficult. While it has long been known that moths visit native flowers and get pollen stuck to their hairy bodies, it has not been ascertained whether they are successfully transferring it to the female parts of neighbouring flowers. “Previously in New Zealand there’s been no good evidence of moth pollination,” says Barbara Anderson from Otago Museum. “It’s all been anecdotal and circumstantial.” “We knew they were able to remove pollen,” says Max Buxton, of Plant and Food Research, “but not whether they were moving it to the right place at the right time.” Buxton, Anderson, and Janice Lord, a University of Otago evolutionary biologist, set up an experiment in Dunedin, using moths caught in local gardens. They painted a fluorescent dye known as pollen tracker on the anthers of mānuka and pinātoro (native daphne) plants, then left the moths to it. They discovered that the moths were indeed successfully transferring pollen between flowers—the first time it has been conclusively shown moths are pollinating native plant species. Compared with other countries, New Zealand has very few bee species. Moths could be doing much of the pollination. Of New Zealand’s 2000 species of moth, 1800 are found only here, having evolved for millions of years alongside our native plants. In the face of massive habitat change and light pollution, this research, says Anderson, is just scratching the surface. “Our understanding of these interactions is at the very beginning,” she says. “Already we’re having these huge impacts on moths and their plant partners. We’re really playing catch-up.”

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Geo News

Between ice and fire

On a summer afternoon in early 2020, the land of the long white cloud temporarily became a land shrouded in an orange haze. Catastrophic bushfires in Australia produced a huge plume of smoke that drifted across the Tasman, reaching altitudes as high as 16 kilometres before settling over the Southern Ocean. Tiny motes of ash and dust mixed with gases fertilised an area of sea larger than Australia itself, seeding an extraordinary bloom of microscopic algae, also known as phytoplankton. The sprinkling of smoke provided three times more iron than usual, promoting unprecedented growth for the time of year. When algae grow, they photosynthesise like a plant. They use sunlight to power the conversion of water and carbon dioxide into food. The smoke-fuelled bloom of early 2020 sponged up a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, roughly equivalent to the amount released by the bushfires. However, it’s unknown whether this carbon removal has a lasting effect. Further south, in the seas around Antarctica, the bloom-and-bust cycles of phytoplankton are usually driven by ice, not fire. When sea ice breaks up and melts, it creates favourable conditions for algal blooms. But when sea-ice cover remains, the lack of sunlight means algae don’t flourish. These blooms play a dual role: as a carbon sink, drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the deep ocean, and as the basis of the Antarctic food web. As the changing climate shifts sea ice around the Antarctic coast, there will be flow-on effects for phytoplankton blooms. In turn, these effects will have implications for the wider Antarctic ecosystem and the global carbon cycle.
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Geo News

Losing tuna

Many Pacific Island nations depend on tuna for survival: the governments of Tuvalu, Tokelau and Kiribati derive more than half their national income from tuna fishing licences and access fees. But climate change will eventually drive the lucrative tuna populations east, away from the territorial waters of many island states and out into the high seas, according to new modelling published in Nature Sustainability in July. If ocean warming continues at current rates, the study predicts, the tuna catch in the waters of ten Pacific nations is expected to decline by an average of 20 per cent by 2050. For some countries, that will result in losses of government revenue of up to 17 per cent—reducing their ability to help their communities adapt to climate change, and potentially making them more reliant on foreign aid. Tuna stocks could be affected, too, as fishing rules, designed to ensure sustainability, are much harder to enforce on the high seas.
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Living World

Meet the spoonbills

They arrived here from Australia without fanfare, flying across the ditch for no reason anyone has been able to deduce. But they liked the look of the place, decided to stay, and started a family. Now, they’re one of New Zealand’s most successful bird species.
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Partner Content

Call of the wild

From kayaking and rafting to rock climbing, mountain biking, nutrition and leadership, an Otago Polytechnic programme prepares learners for a world of wild adventures.
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Geo News

Three-body problem

You can’t see them with the naked eye, but they’re in the Orion constellation, about where the hunter’s head would be: three stars locked together in a triple system known as GW Orionis, around 1300 light years from Earth. Now, evidence is mounting that this system is home to the first known planet orbiting three suns. The planet, thought to be a gas giant like Jupiter, hasn’t been directly sighted. But astronomers have observed a halo of dust, gas and debris encircling the stars, called a protoplanetary disk. These disks form around new stars before coalescing into planets—first the big, hot gas giants, and then the smaller terrestrial planets like Earth. Images of the star system show concentric dust rings encircling the gravitationally bound stars, like a cosmic bullseye. There is a curious gap between the first and second rings, and the first ring is fractured and tilted. New modelling suggests this misalignment is most likely due to one or more planets carving out their orbit. While Earth has just the one sun, several planets orbiting two stars—like Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, in the Star Wars movies—are already known. But the existence of a planet orbiting three stars suggests that planets form more easily than we thought, and in unexpected places. If the triple-star planet does indeed exist, what would you see in its sky? Just two suns would appear, because two stars in this system are so close together that they appear as one. As the planet rotated, the stars would rise and set in patterns hard to imagine for Earthlings accustomed to the concept of night and day. Further observations of the GW Orionis system from telescopes in Chile are expected in the coming months, which may offer further proof of the potential planet.
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Geo News

Tuatara tūpuna

A tiny fossil unearthed in a dusty desert in north-western Argentina provides new clues to the origins of tuatara. The 231-million-year-old skull, measuring just 32 millimetres in length, belonged to Taytalura alcoberi, an ancient member of the scaled reptile family that includes lizards, snakes and tuatara. The skull is an evolutionary puzzle piece: a rare insight into the evolution of scaled reptiles, or lepidosaurs, which diverged from their dinosaur cousins some 260 million years ago. Until now, the early lepidosaurs were represented in the fossil record by just a handful of fragmented specimens from Europe. This specimen is so well preserved in three dimensions that palaeontologists could confidently place it on the tree of life. Taytalura predates the split between the squamates (lizards and snakes) and the sphenodontians—a reptile family with only one living species, the tuatara. Despite being such a distant ancestor, the family resemblance with today’s tuatara is strong. Taytalura has distinctly sphenodontian skull architecture, with anatomical features previously thought to be exclusive to tuatara. The tuatara-type body was the original, with lizards and snakes deviating from this ancestral pattern over time—a finding that could shake up our understanding of reptile evolution. “Taytalura preserves a composition of features that we were not expecting to find in such an early fossil,” says researcher Gabriela Sobral. “It made us question how truly ‘primitive’ certain lizard features are, and it will make scientists reconsider several points in the evolution of this group.”
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Geo News

Bruce finds a solution

A disabled kea named Bruce has come up with his own tool for preening himself. Researchers gathered multiple lines of evidence to show the bird was selecting pebbles for use as a tool for self-care—the first time this has ever been observed in a parrot. Bruce was found as a young kea in Arthur’s Pass with the upper half of his beak missing—probably due to an encounter with a pest trap. He ended up at Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch, where he learned to hold food between his tongue and lower bill, pressing it against hard objects to help him eat it. In 2019, researchers noticed he’d come up with a new innovation: a way of preening himself despite his missing beak. First, Bruce searches for the perfect stone. He rolls it around in his beak for a while to get it lined up correctly, and then he uses it to preen, grinding it against his olive-and-scarlet feathers in order to remove parasites and dust. University of Auckland researchers, including lead author Amalia Bastos, spent 20 hours over nine days camped outside Bruce’s enclosure, their eyes fixed on the parrot, in order to establish whether his tool use was deliberate or accidental. They found that 90 per cent of the time, when Bruce picked up a pebble, he used it to preen. If he happened to drop it, he retrieved it 95 per cent of the time, or found another one before continuing his routine. (They also observed the 14 other kea in the aviary for the same length of time. No other bird used pebbles while preening.) “We have a lot to learn from Bruce,” says Bastos. “He has a serious disability compared with other kea with their massive, powerful beaks, and he’s come up with this innovative way of dealing with his situation.”
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Geo News

A new seahorse

New Zealand has a brand-new endemic species: a tiny, jewel-coloured pygmy pipehorse, just a few centimetres long, that has been hiding in plain sight among the waving seaweeds of the Northland coast. “It’s very unusual for a new species of seahorse to be discovered in New Zealand,” says Auckland Museum’s head of natural sciences, Tom Trnski, who was involved in naming and describing it. “It’s so well camouflaged, and I think that’s why it’s eluded discovery for so long.” The tiny pipehorse has so far been found only off the east coast of Northland: peering shyly from the vegetation on undersea walls near the Bay of Islands, the Poor Knights Island, and Whangaruru. Its natural range pretty much corresponds with Ngātiwai’s rohe, so the scientists asked the iwi to gift a name for the species. Together, the kaumātua and the scientists came up with Cylix tupareomanaia. “Cylix”, which means “chalice” in Latin and Greek, refers to the cup-shaped formation on top of the creature’s head. “Tūpare o manaia” translates as ‘‘the garland of the seahorse”, referencing the animal’s jointed head crest and the word for seahorse in Māori: manaia. It also evokes the location where the original pipehorse specimen was collected, Home Point, which Ngātiwai call Tu Pare o Huia, the plume of the huia. In a world first, Ngātiwai is credited as the “naming authority” of the species. (Historically, this has always been scientists.) “It’s a really beautiful name that links this small taonga with Ngātiwai, the kaitiaki of the coast,” says Trnski. Trnski and his colleagues first submitted the paper to a European scientific journal, but its editors wanted them to cut the Māori abstract—written in the form of a pepeha, or introduction, for the species—and refused to give the naming credit to Ngātiwai. The scientists withdrew the paper and found a new home for it at another journal, where it appeared in full, as weaving of indigenous knowledge with science was respected.
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Geo News

Seal census

The population of Weddell seals in Antarctica is smaller than expected, according to a new crowdsourced count of the iconic polar species. Around 202,000 female Weddell seals call the icy coasts of Antarctica home, the study estimates—far fewer than the previous estimate of 800,000. “That doesn’t necessarily mean there has been a big decrease of Weddell seals recently,” says lead researcher Michelle LaRue from the University of Canterbury, “but instead, this is probably a more accurate count that we can use as a baseline to determine change over time.” More than 330,000 citizen-science volunteers tagged thousands of seals in hundreds of satellite images depicting the Antarctic coastline. The very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite images were captured in November 2011. The non-invasive approach is perfect for seal monitoring: previously “the only way to study the seals was to travel by snow machine, or if you were lucky, a helicopter flight to get a little farther afield”, says LaRue. “Now, anyone with internet access can count them from space.” It’s the first time ever that the global population of a wide-ranging animal has been estimated from direct counts. But why only count the females? During the summer months, when the images were captured, male Weddell seals spend most of their time defending their underwater territory. Meanwhile, females lounge on the ice nursing their single newborn pup, meaning the blubbery, bodacious females are the ones snapped from space (the pups are too small to appear in the images). The study also assessed where Weddell seals like to live, finding that they prefer fast ice (anchored to the shore) that is close to deep water. The fast-ice lifestyle means that the seals need to maintain breathing holes, which they gnaw open with their teeth. They also like having emperor penguins as their neighbours—as long as there aren’t too many of the fish-gobbling waddlers, which increases competition for food.
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Editorial

Too much information

“Pandemics are not just mass fatality events, they are mass disabling events,” a radiologist told me a couple of weeks ago. I’ve spent the month of October talking to New Zealanders who caught COVID-19 and then didn’t get better again. I spoke to seven people with long COVID, as well as people experiencing or studying myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), which is also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. The two are likely sister illnesses, rooted in the same immunological mystery. The trouble with ME, and for some people with long COVID, is that the usual suite of tests don’t find anything wrong with them. As University of Otago emeritus professor Warren Tate has learned, the damage that leads to ME is visible only on a molecular level. The same is likely true for some types of long COVID. The radiologist developed the symptoms of ME about a year ago. He remembered learning about it at medical school in Otago back in the day. But you don’t really get it, he realised, until you get it. Admist the deluge of facts about COVID-19, two pieces of important information have failed to surface. One is that the risk of disability is higher than the risk of death. Connected to this: we can’t predict who is most at risk of losing their health from the virus in the same way that we can predict who is most at risk of losing their life. And so I looked at long COVID, as well as the other information voids that the government is facing, in the feature on page 60. The second piece of information is that managing COVID-19 within our country is going to require changes on a structural level, not just a personal one. In the past, the way out of epidemics has involved making widescale changes to the fabric of society. We had to improve sewerage systems to get rid of cholera. We had to improve hygiene habits to prevent sepsis. We are going to have to improve ventilation in order to stop the Delta variant in its tracks. And we are going to have to change something about the nature of work to allow people to contain the virus. Keeping yourself safe from COVID isn’t just on you. It also depends on the options available to the people around you: whether they have the ability to stay home from work with a sore throat or keep a feverish child back from school. It depends on their access to tests and vaccinations and masks. The structural change we face today is in the form of a national rethink of how we manage illness, and how illness and work interface. Is this a paranoid view? Epidemiologist Michael Baker laughs when he tells me about being criticised for “barking at cars”. His job is to spot unknowns—the ones that might come back to bite us—so that we can know them better. “Maybe this will turn into quite a benign virus in a couple of years’ time,” he says. “We’ll say, ‘Well, what was all the fuss about?’ We have incomplete knowledge.” But the practice of public health, he says, defaults to a precautionary approach. “When you don’t know about the level of threat from something, you take a more severe interpretation until proven otherwise.” This makes sense to me. The human immune system is no less complex than the human brain, and we don’t know what’s going on in either of them. We can detect subatomic particles and operate robots on the surface of Mars, but we still don’t know why two people’s bodies act differently when the same viral particles go up their noses. That, I think, is worthy of our caution.
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Geo News

Ancient fires

Soot found in Antarctic ice indicates an increase of fires in New Zealand around the year 1300, thought to have been set after Māori arrived in the country, according to a team of researchers from North America, Europe and Australia. New Zealand scientists aren’t so convinced. Postdoctoral fellow Holly Winton at the Antarctic Research Centre in Wellington points out that Australia and Patagonia may also have been sources of the black carbon layer in the ice—geochemical analysis of the carbon could reveal the type of vegetation burned. For Priscilla Wehi, director of Te Pūnaha Matatini centre of research excellence in Auckland, the paper is a missed opportunity; mātauranga Māori and local research could have informed its conclusions. “‘Helicopter science’, where research is led and conducted by those who live and work far from the subject of their work, is currently under scrutiny in the research community,” she says. “How much better could this have been were it more inclusive in this approach?”

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