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?
This map focuses on the top of the South Island, and shows some of Aotearoa’s oldest and youngest rocks. The Tasman region’s hills and mountains contain the country’s oldest geological features. Between Takaka and Karamea lie ancient blocks of crooked mountains and valleys. These rocks formed during the Cambrian period, when life was restricted to the seas. The youngest rocks are typically those found in coastal river valleys and floodplains. The Wairau and Awatere valleys are the most recently formed parts of Marlborough. Rivers have transported gravels down from the mountains and created substantial coastal floodplains. Along with a favourable climate, well-draining soils are the basis of the region’s extensive vineyards. How to read The palest tones represent the youngest landscapes. The darker the colour, the older the bedrock.
Geoffery Matautia’s love letter to the community he grew up in.
The Hauraki Gulf is in trouble. Dwindling fish stocks, water pollution and increasing sedimentation are damaging the world’s first marine park and sounding alarms for researchers studying the area.
For generations, Samoan healers have been using the plant matalafi to treat inflammation, and illnesses caused by spirits or ghosts. So when Seeseei Molimau-Samasoni returned to her home village to collect plants for her doctoral research into traditional medicines, she was sceptical about matalafi. But of the 11 plants she analysed, it was the most potent. Matalafi (Psychotria insularum) is a member of the coffee family and grows throughout the South Pacific, but its use as a traditional medicine has been documented only in Samoa. Molimau-Samasoni consulted healers about how they prepared and used the leaf juice and pulp, and back at her lab at Victoria University of Wellington, tests on cells and in mice found that matalafi has an anti-inflammatory effect similar to ibuprofen, and that it affects cells’ iron levels. Working with Helen Woolner, who is Cook Island Māori, Molimau-Samasoni identified two iron-binding molecules with anti-inflammatory properties. Iron is an essential element, with an important role in cellular processes. While people are perhaps more aware of iron deficiency, says Woolner, iron imbalance or overload is associated with several serious diseases. She hopes to investigate matalafi’s effectiveness in the treatment of certain cancers and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s. Molimau-Samasoni is back in Apia, working at the Scientific Research Organisation of Samoa, where she leads a team looking into Samoan medicinal plants, soil microbes and marine organisms for any antibacterial, anti-gout or anti-cancer properties. “It is hugely important for Pacific people to lead research into Pacific traditional knowledge,” she says, “and Pacific natural or genetic resources.”
Land is owned, but the sea is shared. And we haven’t been sharing very well.
Diversifying your skill set can help you gain an edge on the competition when looking for employment after graduation.
Barley and cranberries for breakfast. Spelt and seeds for lunch, with soft cheese and beer. If you were a European salt miner 2700 years ago, that is. Researchers took a close look at salt-cured faeces, preserved for thousands of years in an Austrian salt mine, to identify components of the Iron Age diet. One ancient poo contained the fungal species used to make blue cheese (Penicillium roqueforti) and to ferment beer (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), providing evidence of, perhaps, a cheeseboard and a bevvy. The faecal samples pointed to a carb-rich, plant-based diet: lots of cereals such as barley and spelt, supplemented with occasional broad beans, fruits such as crab apples and cranberries, and seeds such as opium poppy seeds. There was a little consumption of meat from cattle and pigs.
The cognitive benefits of exercise are no secret to anybody who has been for a good run, or spent an hour in the gym lifting weights. But research from the University of Auckland’s Brain Dynamics Research Lab suggests those same ‘brain gains’ can be made with a short burst of high intensity exercise, offering a new tool in the war against the mid-afternoon workday slump.
Hidden among damp leaf litter, rocks and tree roots, the nocturnal Hamilton’s frog (Leiopelma hamiltoni) leads a surprising social life. During the day, the frogs retreat to damp, cosy crevices—often accompanied by a flatmate. These flatmates aren’t chosen at random—some frogs preferentially hang out with specific frogs, and avoid others they don’t like. In other words, frogs have friends. To map these amphibian social networks, researchers at the University of Otago turned to a captive population of Hamilton’s frogs. PhD student Luke Easton had been keeping detailed notes of the frogs’ interactions over several years, tracking them with photo ID. Individual frogs can be differentiated based on their distinctive markings: the pattern of mottled brown-and-black blotches on their back, “sort of like leopard spots”, says the study’s lead author, Simon Lamb. “One of the individuals was called Mo, because he had a moustache pattern.” Lamb realised that the meticulous notes collected by Easton could be used in social network analysis—a fancy statistical way of examining social associations between individuals. “You build up a map of who likes to hang out with each other.” The analysis assessed the strength of the friendship between individuals—the frequency of their hang-outs—and the diversity of interactions across the network. Were the same individuals always choosing the same flatmates, or were they switching it up? Were there froggy feuds? “In one of the tanks, we had one female that only hung out with one male during the entire study and that male almost never hung out with other females in the tank—only, like, a couple of times.” The idea for the study was sparked by a frog friendship observed at Zealandia Ecosanctuary. There, Joseph Altobelli, also from the University of Otago, spotted two female Hamilton’s frogs in the open, locked in a damp embrace, one plopped directly on top of the other. Going back over frog census records kept since 2012, he realised that these two individuals had been spending time together for the previous eight years. “This got us thinking, maybe there’s something up here,” he says. “Everything we know about frog social interaction is kind of limited to breeding behaviour. But how do they associate on a day-to-day basis? “People have assumed that amphibians maybe don’t have these higher-level social interactions like mammals and birds, and I think that’s led to them being overlooked.” How do Hamilton’s frogs chat with each other? This ancient species doesn’t call—they don’t even have eardrums. “It’s still a bit of a mystery as to how they communicate,” says Altobelli. “They may be using chemical cues.” The next step involves exploring amphibian social networks in the wild by equipping the frogs with tiny radio backpacks. This will allow the researchers to precisely determine who is hanging out with who. “Having this little window into their social life is actually really important,” says Altobelli. “It tells us a lot about how social interactions may play into the frogs’ survival, and then that will help us with their conservation.”
Health geographer Jesse Whitehead has been mapping New Zealanders’ access to healthcare, whether it’s the distance they have to travel to a vaccination clinic, or whether it would be more equitable to ensure vaccines are available at schools or GP clinics (it turns out that schools offer better coverage). These maps show the distance people must travel to the nearest metropolitan hospital (located in major cities, with a wide range of services) or regional hospital (with less capacity and fewer services).
The number of critically endangered tarāpuka/black-billed gulls that abandoned their nesting site on Canterbury’s Waimakariri River in November. Though tarāpuka number in the tens of thousands, they are the most endangered gulls in the world as they are rapidly declining. Two dead tarāpuka were found at the site, but experts aren’t sure whether the disruption was caused by a dog attack, a vehicle coming too close, or something else. “It’s their environment and we’ve heavily impacted it,” says David Owen from Environment Canterbury. “We need to keep vehicles and dogs away from them and give them a fair chance."
Usually, the answer to this question is something along the lines of: Holding power to account. Informing the citizenry. Shining a light on what’s hidden. Facilitating democracy, which, according to the Washington Post, dies in darkness. Giving a voice to the voiceless. New Zealand Geographic has an extra role to play. Our features frequently point out the choices we have before us—especially those with inevitable consequences. The state of the Hauraki Gulf seems, on the face of it, like one of those inevitabilities. Things look very different from when my grandparents were my age. The spotted shags have gone, and most of the crayfish. The kelp forests are disappearing too, mowed down by kina that pattern the rocky seafloor like pox. It’s not the urchins’ fault—they’re not in good shape either, half-starved. Their world is out of joint because their predators disappeared. The top got lopped off their food chain. But that’s the price of development, isn’t it? The cost of 1.7 million people living around the gulf. You’ve got to expect some kind of environmental change, right? Yet the loss of crayfish and large snapper isn’t a condition of the city’s growth, nor a prerequisite to its people’s wellbeing. We could have both Auckland and crayfish on the coast. But there are so few crayfish, right now, that their absence is about to launch a cascade of unintended consequences. If the ecosystem gets far enough out of balance, it’ll tip over into something entirely different, and we won’t be able to resurrect the old version. Whether or not you like the taste of kina, few would want it to be the only kaimoana on the menu. This is a choice we’re on the cusp of making. We could act in time to reverse the chain of events. Or we could continue down the path we’re on. Inaction is a choice with consequences, too. If we don’t make decisions rooted in our values, we’ll end up in a place we never intended to reach. As we drain the last dregs of 2021, it’s easy to feel like nothing’s in our control, that we’re helpless in the face of governments around the world and the terrible lottery played whenever the virus replicates in our cells. But if the COVID-19 lockdowns have taught us anything, it’s that we can change our behaviour dramatically in order to fix a problem—even really big, complex problems. Especially when it’s a matter of life or death. New Zealanders agree on a lot of things. We want to be able swim in clean, unpolluted waters, whether we’re surfing or snorkelling or taking bone-chilling river dips. We want our oceans to be brimming with life, whether we prefer to look at it or hunt and eat it. It’s possible to make choices that will lead us to both of these things—albeit choices that are difficult in the short-term. If I have a motto for the stories in the magazine, it’s this: To show that the world around us isn’t on its default setting, that we have made it this way, and we could make it differently.
From trophies to traditional medicine, the illegal trade in bear parts is driving some iconic species to extinction—and New Zealand is one destination in the $2 billion global market for smuggled bear products. In the ten years to 2018, New Zealand authorities made 412 seizures of smuggled bear parts and bear-derived products. More than 80 per cent of the seizures related to traditional medicines—often bear bile or gall bladder extract—but some also included bear parts and trophies.
Visitors to the Ōamaru Blue Penguin Colony are helping to create a more sustainable tourism industry.
Waiheke Island is a hotbed of experimental winemaking, but nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Auckland’s Goldwater Wine Science Centre.
Mining the deep ocean is likely to begin in the next few years, as countries and companies look to exploit a previously untapped resource of cobalt and other minerals essential for technologies like smartphones, laptops, and electric car batteries. But scientists have raised concerns about the impacts deep-sea mining will have on ocean ecosystems. A recent study found that mining claims in the high seas already have significant overlap with important tuna fisheries—the skipjack, bigeye and yellowfin tuna that many Pacific Island nations depend on. Mining produces toxins as well as large amounts of sediment that will have to be released into the water, reducing visibility and affecting the jellyfish, squid, zooplankton and small fish that tuna eat, says lead author Jesse van der Grient from the University of Hawai’i. “They might die, they might not grow as fast, or they might not reproduce as well. It could mean the tuna have less food and therefore we have less tuna. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the fishing industry could take a significant hit if ocean mining goes ahead.” Setting appropriate restrictions before mining begins is crucial—but scientists were concerned that a meeting of the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica in December could rush through approvals before research has been done.
Whether it’s native tree planting, energy efficient buildings or sensors to protect fragile cave ecosystems, Waitomo’s tourism businesses are deeply committed to sustainability.
Have you ever found a cuttlefish bone washed up by the tide? You may also have seen one of the bleached, surfboard-shaped shells in a budgie’s cage, acting as a calcium supplement. These are actually neither bone nor shell, but function in a similar way, giving shape and buoyancy to cuttlefish. There are no cuttlefish in New Zealand waters, but their remains are washed here from Australia. So, which species were they? And what had killed them? Researchers at Te Papa Tongarewa set out to solve the mystery. They managed to extract DNA from the dorsal shield, the top layer of the cuttlebones, and discovered that those most commonly found belonged to the Australian giant cuttlefish, Sepia apama. This animal lives in seagrass meadows and rocky reefs around the southern coasts of Australia, and it can rapidly change colour, flashing through different shades like a neon sign. Next, the Te Papa team analysed the punctures, cuts, and scratches found on the cuttlebones to try to determine what had eaten them. Using animal skulls and teeth from the museum’s collections, they made indentations in Blu Tack, then matched up the bite marks with the patterns on the cuttlebones to find the culprits: albatrosses, sharks and dolphins.
Pedal power is one of the best ways to appreciate the natural beauty of Whakarewarewa Forest in Rotorua.
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