Armyworms are ravenous. They decimate crops and will take a thriving vege garden down to stalks overnight. Then they’ll come inside and eat your houseplants. They’ve been in New Zealand a long time but this summer, they boomed—and an even hungrier cousin blew in from over the ditch.
Christchurch photographer Joe Harrison documents the waterways of his home city.
How do animals know where they’re going? Humans have been puzzling over the mysteries of migration and navigation for centuries, and our ideas about it have gone from absolutely wild to only slightly less so.
Few native New Zealand plants produce a sweet and tasty fruit that you can pick and eat straight away. Pātōtara, a prickly, low-growing shrub, is one of them. Its juicy yellow-orange berries, about the size of currants and tasting like apricots, were once a popular sweet treat for children. The heath-like shrub spreads laterally, often forming quite dense stands of upright stems up to about 15 centimetres tall. The leaves have a hard texture and a tip that narrows to a fine, sharp point that can be prickly to touch. It’s common in dryland sites at all altitudes throughout Aotearoa, ranging from coastal sand dunes at sea level to rocky outcrops, low tussock grasslands and sub-alpine herb fields. Pātōtara has a long flowering season, from September to January, with flowers and fruit appearing at the same time, and fruit ripening from February through to April. Its white, tubular flowers have a strong honey scent. When the plant was more plentiful, its fragrance filled whole alpine valleys; with an offshore wind, it was apparently perceptible to mariners at sea—even before land was within sight. In Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Māori, Herries Beattie’s informants told him the kiore/native rat, weka, and even the koreke/extinct native quail relied on a diet of berries from native plants, including pātōtara. This plant also features in a number of recipes for traditional Māori perfumes and scents, including an oil to anoint bodies before burial. In this recipe, the root of the pātōtara was carefully scraped and smelled like cloves, according to one source in Murdoch Riley’s Māori Healing and Herbal. Medicinally, crushed leaves of pātōtara, mānuka, tarata and kawakawa were mixed with taramea gum and oil from kōhia/New Zealand passionfruit seeds to make a scented oil to treat chronic aches and pains. Excerpted from Treasures of Tāne: Plants of Ngāi Tahu by Rob Tipa (Huia Publishers).
The other day I watched a man walk onto the bus, put down his laptop and blazer, and sneeze a streak of snot on his arm. He looked at it. Made a decision. And wiped his arm on the seat. Of all the bad things happening in the world, my immediate worry is COVID-19. Partly because we don’t understand it properly—especially long COVID, and the cumulative damage caused even by mild infections—but also because I keep getting it. Five times! This is a loopy bit of anecdata; it says nothing about my inclination to follow rules or avoid risk. I’ve been wearing an N95—a good snug one, with a Darth Vader filter—in crowded indoor spaces, and some outdoor ones, since the pandemic began. (It’s not the kids bringing it home, either: four of those times, I’ve been the only person in the house to get hit.) You might be more worried about the cost of living. Flood cleanup. Our broken housing market, the recession, ram raids. Cooked coral. Melting ice. Canada on fire. Maui on fire. Whichever place catches fire next. But zoom out and we are all worrying about the same thing. “A delusion of separation”, a colleague called it today: the idea that all of these things are just happening, that they have nothing to do with environmental policy, and that surface-level tweaks like removing GST or fixing potholes will make any difference at all to the terrifying downhill slide. We try to publish stories that have different trajectories. But time after time, all paths lead to loss—we’re either documenting the imminent prospect of loss, or the throes of it, or the ghosts left behind. Even in a story about people righting wrongs, like killing all the rats on a tiny Tongan island, that bigger, scarier narrative hangs over everything. Our stories are also stories of entanglement. Of repercussions, ripple effects. Wipe burrowing seabirds out of your forests—change the chemistry of the country—and the trees “run out of juice”. Send sediment down the rivers and the sea turns to soup, teeming with a parasite that’s killing endangered dolphins. Ratchet up the heat and watch new, ravenous caterpillars munch through your vege gardens. This is a catalogue of our screw-ups. But it’s also a lesson: the way we use our environment matters. The way we eat, and get from A to B, and orient ourselves around other species—it all matters. And we can change it. But right now, instead of making any real change, we’re barely coping with each symptom, each shock. Two weeks ago Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told Toby Manhire on the Gone by Lunchtime podcast that he felt his government had only really achieved one term’s worth of work, because COVID had been such a time suck. That’s going to keep happening. And it’s going to get worse. (Watch what happens to the cost of living if we blow past two degrees of warming.) We urgently need to focus on the causes. We can’t continue to be blinded by the flurry of effects. Yet in this election campaign, meaningful environmental policy is being treated as frivolous. Something separate and out of reach. Again. My vote goes to whoever shows me that they understand. That they see the stories we’re telling here—there’s only one story, really— and that they’re ready, finally, to rewrite it. So far it’s a pretty short list.
Once upon a time, raucous, stinking colonies of seabirds blanketed huge areas of Aotearoa’s mainland, each burrow and poo and eggshell helping fuel the forests. Those birds are gone now—but a new modelling tool gives a fascinating glimpse of what once was.
Of all the species living on Earth, perhaps two-thirds of them live in the dirt under your feet, according to a group of Swiss scientists who set out to make an educated guess on the matter. Obviously, it isn’t possible to count everything in the soil everywhere on Earth. The scientists’ estimate is built on multiple estimates made by other groups of researchers. The Swiss trio looked at the entire tree of life—they wanted to know how many bacteria and viruses lived in the soil as well as how many plants, worms, bugs and fungi. Viruses were particularly hard to measure, because viruses aren’t categorised as species, like plants and animals are. Instead, the researchers decided that viruses with sufficiently different DNA or RNA would count as different species. What’s the point of making such a guess, if it’s just a guess? We know that dirt is the basis of life on Earth, and that it even has an impact on human health—previous research has shown that the soil microbiome and human microbiome are connected. That means it’s useful to have a big-picture idea of what lives down below.
A tattoo artist traces his history—and his future.
After three warm, wet La Niña summers in a row, El Niño is coming. The climate pattern is well known for its effect on New Zealand’s weather, but what will it mean for the sea? Marine heatwaves have plagued our oceans since 2020. In some places, sea temperatures spiked by five degrees. Tens of millions of sponges bleached in Fiordland and 1300 tonnes of farmed salmon died in the Marlborough Sounds. This July, winter sea temperatures around Rakiura Stewart Island remained more than four degrees above average. El Niño may bring some respite, says NIWA oceanographer Erik Behrens. Whereas La Niña winds tend northeasterly, shuttling warm air down from the tropics and heating the surface of the ocean, El Niño usually brings strong westerlies and southwesterlies. Colder winds over warm oceans make the water column unstable, mixing cool water from underneath with that on the surface, dissipating built-up heat. “We will still see heatwaves, but they shouldn’t be as intense,” says Behrens. Still, southerly winds battered the South Island this winter, yet the marine heatwaves remained. “You’d expect a few good southerlies to stand up the oceans and make [the heatwaves] vanish,” says Behrens. That they didn’t suggests the ocean is overwarm all the way down, he says—holding a “memory” of three scorching years.
New data released by Stats NZ suggest Aotearoa has turned a corner in greenhouse gas emissions, reducing from a pre-pandemic peak of 21 million tonnes in March 2019 to 18.4 million tonnes in December last year. But the story for each industry sector is a little more complex than the total might suggest. Both mining and commercial transport emissions have increased, while an economic slowdown has led to reductions in agriculture, forestry, fishing and manufacturing. Record rainfall teamed with new solar and wind generation has meant our energy sector has been flush with renewable power—rather than importing and burning coal—resulting in a whopping reduction of 1.7 million tonnes of emissions. So has New Zealand really turned a corner? Can we sustain these lower numbers? The graph suggests it’s possible. In the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, emissions plummeted from 21 to 18.3 million tonnes, then rebounded to 20 million within months, but the trendline since 2019 describes a long downward ramp—not yet fast enough to meet our climate goals and obligations, but heading in the right direction nonetheless.
A team of New Zealanders and Tongans have just carpeted a remote volcanic island in Tonga with poisoned bait, hoping to eradicate rats—and with that one action, restore a vibrant, interconnected ecosystem of seabirds, forest animals, coral reefs and marine life.
Many of the world’s oceans are greener than they were 20 years ago, a new study published in Nature has found—suggesting climate change is altering sea-surface ecosystems. A single satellite orbiting the Earth for the past two decades has been keeping tabs on the colour of the oceans by measuring the way different wavelengths of light reflect from its surface. Scientists had thought we’d need many more years of data before signs of climate change would show up in this way, but by looking at seven light wavelengths, the researchers found that more than half of the oceans worldwide have significantly altered in hue— especially in temperate and tropical areas—and that the shift can’t be explained by natural variability. What’s causing the deviation isn’t yet clear, but it likely has something to do with the interaction between warming waters, ocean nutrients and phytoplankton—tiny aquatic plants that contain the green pigment chlorophyll. Changes in plankton communities on such a vast, global scale have implications for ocean carbon storage, food webs and fisheries, the study authors say, meaning the switch from blue to green could be an early-warning signal of wider shifts.
When it comes to investing, time in the market generally beats timing the market.
The difference between exploring and being lost is the ability to return home. Te Rā tells the story of Māori voyaging and weaving technology, and has finally returned home—for now.
Otago Polytechnic/Te Pūkenga is widening the agricultural horizons of ākonga (learners) by letting them learn the ropes on a Central Otago high country farm.
Hector’s and Māui dolphins are dying in nets—but their biggest foe might be a virus carried by cats. Can transformative tech cut through the tangle and save the creatures at the heart of it?
On a remarkably still winter’s day, photographer Rob Suisted took his six-year-old son out of school to see mollymawks. For once, Cook Strait was a millpond, and the pair set off in Suisted’s boat, planning to photograph the passing albatrosses and send the pictures back to the boy’s class. What they found instead was a feeding frenzy. The pair saw mollymawks, but they weren’t flying past—they were sitting expectantly on the water. Then Suisted saw the splashing. Around 20 Kekeno/New Zealand fur seals were diving into the depths over a seamount, and hauling up glistening silver frostfish the length of a person. “The fish were too big to eat in one go, so they had to eat them like frankfurters—from the tail end first, which was not too nice for the fish!” says Suisted. The seals would thrash the frostfish from side to side, sending water and flesh flying, and attracting petrels and mollymawks to the melée. Over other seamounts nearby, the same thing was happening, and the drama played out all day. “It was definitely an event,” says Suisted. Sword-like pāra/frostfish are common in western Cook Strait says NIWA fisheries scientist Richard O’Driscoll. They are themselves ferocious predators that live at depths of 50-600 metres, but he’s never heard of them getting ripped apart by seals at the surface in this way. “There’s a lot we still don’t know about them,” he says. Before deepwater fishing, pāra were mainly encountered washed up fresh on beaches. In some Māori stories, they ran aground while chasing the moon; early European settlers believed they deliberately stranded themselves on calm, frosty winter nights—hence the name.
Bangers get a boost in the summertime, researchers analysing 66 years’ worth of UK weekly pop charts have found. They scored more than 23,000 songs on factors such as tempo, danceability and energy, then compared the songs and their rankings with the weather. The result: songs with high intensity, that spark joy and happiness, soared to the top of the pops when the weather was warmer and less rainy. Loud, fast and energetic songs—the kind boosted by summery climes—included the 80s dance bop ‘Get Loose’ by Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King, the early 2000s banger ‘Temperature’ by Sean Paul, and a cover of ‘Ice Ice Baby’ by the cast of the TV show Glee. Songs in the top 10 showed the strongest associations with weather, fluctuating with the seasons. This suggests that it’s not just the quality of a song that propels it to the top of the charts, but also the prevailing weather. The study authors suggest that sunny weather may make people feel happier, leading them to listen to upbeat music to match their mood—but they can’t say for sure, noting that the study only measures correlation. It’s clear that we do, however, like singin’ in the rain: the popularity of low-intensity sad songs did not appear to change when the weather did.
How heavy are your periods? Medically, it’s an important question—one-third of patients bleed heavily, which can cause iron deficiency or anaemia, and occasionally be so severe as to require blood transfusions or surgery. But it’s a very difficult question to answer. Bethany Bannow is an Oregon haematologist with a special interest in bleeding disorders and menstruation. “I see patients in my clinic all the time with terrible periods who have no idea they are heavy,” she says, “because their periods, and often those of their female relatives, have always been heavy.” So doctors tend to ask a second question: how often do you have to change your sanitary product? But here, too, they’ve been flying blind—because they have scant information about the absorbency of those products. The only published studies used saline or water, not menstrual fluid or anything like it. And no one had compared the capacity of more modern products such as menstrual cups and discs, or period underwear. In a study just published in the British Medical Journal, Bannow and her co-authors used blood—expired O+—to soak 21 period products of various types, sizes and brands. The graphic above shows the maximum each type of product could handle. Often, this was much less than advertised. Period underwear absorbed 3mL, “and quite slowly”. A ‘Ziggy’ menstrual disc, meanwhile, held 80mL. That much menstrual fluid, even if it took an entire cycle to accumulate, is enough to diagnose a patient with heavy bleeding.
Suzanne Heywood, HarperCollins, $37.99
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