That isn’t a cheerful bonfire, it’s a massive cleanup operation. In Tairāwhiti the beaches are smothered in dead wood. Mountains are sliding into rivers; forests swarm with possums. While officials demur, transfixed by the bottom line, the people who belong to this land are moving home—and working to repair it.
Leslie Adkin wore a lot of hats: photographer, farmer, pioneering tramper, husband and father, self-taught geologist, anthropologist. But it’s his pictures that have had the broadest impact. His meticulously created photographs, showcased in a new book, are an exceptional record of daily life in the early 1900s.
How the animal kingdom first grew feathers—and got off the ground.
It is impossible to write an editorial before the rest of the magazine is finished. That last week is like being stuck in a small room with 17 radios all nattering away on different stations. But now, it’s ten to seven on the night we go to press. Everything else is done; the designer is tucking the magazine into bed. In the hush, I sit down to write. The best thing the kids and I did in the school holidays was visit a bead shop. The two of them got their own special seats and trays and spent 90 minutes in a transcendent state of immersion. My five-year-old, who is learning to add, whispered under her breath as she arranged her beads in groups. My son, almost 10, chose beads stamped with letters and set about threading them upside down and back to front, so the names scan properly for anyone looking at him. (Everyone looks at him; his necklace is spectacular.) It had been a frenetic couple of weeks in our family—holidays are busy, with two parents working. Leaning against a wall, I watched the kids’ breathing change, and mine did, too. At one point, Ben sighed happily and announced that “making” was his favourite thing to do, apart from watching Bondi Rescue. The rest of the day was delightful. And the necklaces they made are their most prized possessions—they both wore them to school this morning, for photo day. I see a similar magic at work in those who love bonsai (page 52). The trees are little but they’re super high maintenance: fertilising and watering is an always-job, then there are the occasional tasks such as pest control and mixing substrate and repotting and carving and shaping… One practitioner, Rossco Phillips, told me he could happily spend hours wiring his trees, a repetitive, productive task that he has to think about, but only a little bit. Fellow bonsai devotee Zianne van Zyl agrees: “I think that’s a drug people chase, when they do bonsai, is that flow state. And the good feeling after you’ve done it, looking back and seeing this tree and going, ‘Man, this is awesome.’” Flow is everywhere in this magazine. See: John Hollows sinking himself into cold, shallow ponds, watching his beloved kōura for hours (page 34), and Terressa Shandley Kollat slipping into the bush or the sea at any opportunity (page 26). I suspect many scientists drop into a state of flow when they’re in the field, getting face time with whichever little cog of the world most fascinates them. Where do New Zealand Geographic contributors go for flow? Water’s a theme, unsurprisingly. Writers Kate Evans and Michelle Duff (a senior journalist who makes her feature debut with us in this issue, on page 92) like to surf, sometimes together. Photojournalist Richard Robinson gets underwater. Publisher James Frankham sails. Journalist Bill Morris also writes and performs country music. Rebekah White, who edited this magazine for seven years and is now at large, chucks a tent on her back and goes tramping. Writer Asia Martusia King’s first feature for us is the cover story on bonsai. She loves drawing. “You forget to eat or pee or move and you are in actual physical pain afterwards,” she texted me. “You get such a rush when you’re lost in the shapes and movements of a good sketch.” What’s yours, she asked? Oh. Um. My noise-cancelling headphones? Reading half a New Yorker feature in bed each night? Getting up early to get the lunchboxes done? These do not at all meet the threshold for flow, I realised: they’re blips of peace, not full, focused immersion. Two years ago, to squeeze this job into my week, I gave up karate. I hate group exercise, but karate felt different—something about the ritual and patterns, the balance, the absence of stupid gym music, snicked my brain into another gear. I remember walking out of those weekly sessions elated. I only got to do it for a few months. I think it's time to go back.
A handful of environmentalists on Niue are waging an urgent battle against invasive species. Will reinforcements arrive in time?
New Year’s Day, 1967. North of Auckland, marine biologist Bill Ballantine decides he’ll kick off the year by taking the temperature of the sea. This is how one of the longest ocean-temperature records in the Southern Hemisphere begins. In 2022, the record chalks up its hottest year: the Hauraki Gulf is in heatwave mode 86 per cent of the time. It’s the same story for the rest of the country. The oceans surrounding New Zealand reached their highest-recorded temperatures either in 2022 or 2023, according to data released last month by Stats NZ. Our coastal waters warmed between 0.74 and 1.35°C in the past four decades. What does this mean for sea life? Fifty million Fiordland sponges were wiped out by an intense heatwave in 2022, New Zealand scientists report in Global Change Biology—the largest such dieoff ever recorded worldwide. Now, Stats NZ is keeping an eye on phytoplankton, the invisible plants which sustain marine food chains. Their numbers have been decreasing in New Zealand waters since 2019.
Terressa Shandley Kollat’s a star on TikTok—but she’s much more at home in the water.
Climate change will help one of the most pernicious pest birds in the country spread south, a new study has found—and reports from Christchurch suggest it’s already happening. Common mynas, native to India, were introduced to New Zealand in the late 1800s in an attempt to control agricultural pests. Introductions in the South Island mostly failed, but the bolshie birds became well established in the upper North Island. Now, the mynas are themselves agricultural pests. The birds are also fiercely territorial and destroy the eggs of other species, including natives. In a paper published in the journal Biological Invasions, University of Auckland PhD student Kamolphat Atsawawaranunt looks at ecological variables such as rainfall, season length and tree cover to unpick how much mynas had to adapt to thrive here, and where they might be able to live as the weather warms. [caption id="attachment_513998" align="alignnone" width="954"] Green is go—for mynas, that is. Right now the South Island is mostly too cold for the pests. This map shows where the birds may be able to live based on a temperature rise of 2.4 °C by 2085 and increased human population density projections.[/caption] He maps three future scenarios, according to a range of climate pathways—and in all of them, the mynas spread south. Birdwatchers in Christchurch report the southern invasion is already under way. Ornithologist Peter Langlands has been keeping an eye on a number of birds in the city—he suspects these mynas are either unwanted pets or hitchhiked in on container ships. “It’s probably just by accident that they haven’t already spread down here in greater numbers,” he says. “There’s really nothing stopping them from taking off, especially with the winters being milder.” He’s nicknamed the first one he spotted “Houdini”. The Canterbury Regional Council has engaged a contractor to cull the mynas it is aware of, and Langlands has set up a Facebook page to collate sightings.
Off the warming northeastern coasts of New Zealand, a spiky problem is snowballing. Centrostephanus rodgersii, the longspined sea urchin, is a native species, but the comparatively balmy winters underwater are supercharging its reproduction. On top of that, we’ve eaten too many of its probable key predators—big crays. Throngs of these deep-purple urchins can, like kina, demolish kelp forests and create bare underwater barrens—only worse, says the University of Auckland’s Arie Spyksma (who also works with New Zealand Geographic). While kina bottom out around 15 metres below sea level, Centrostephanus thrive from five metres to 50. “That’s catastrophic,” says Spyksma. “Kelp forests, those deep invertebrate communities, they’re all at risk of just being wiped out. But before we can really manage them, we need to understand the scale of the problem. Where are they occurring? Where are the hotspots?” Enter the robots. Spyksma and collaborators from Tasmania—where Centrostephanus is predicted to demolish 50 per cent of kelp forests within six years if large-scale control doesn’t happen—are enlisting artificial intelligence to speed up the science and keep pace with rapidly changing ocean ecosystems. The scientists have developed an “urchinbot”, which can rapidly analyse vast numbers of underwater images and pinpoint sea urchins, labelling each as kina or Centrostephanus (pictured is a scan of the seafloor at Tūhua/Mayor Island). The tech is right about 90 per cent of the time, says Spyksma—a “really good” hit rate that lifts a huge processing load from scientists. They’ve also created another AI tool to classify seafloor habitat, identifying whether it’s kelp forest or urchin barren. Researchers still have to go out and collect the images at sea—they can do this fairly quickly, by towing cameras from a boat or remotely operated vehicle. But then the robots will go to work. In Tasmania, they’ll track how well management operations work. In New Zealand, they’ll show us where the urchins have taken hold. Both robots will soon be available to hapū and community groups, pumping out the information we need to plan the best pushback—and protect our precious kelp forests.
What force of nature kills more New Zealanders than volcanoes, tsunamis and earthquakes combined? Landslides. With climate change making landslides more frequent, and the South Island overdue for a big quake, scientists are racing to understand the risk. But the tricky part is translating that existential maths into action.
A fossilised bone found in a Canterbury stream turns out to be from a nothosaur—the first proof that these massive, predatory marine reptiles ever lived in the southern hemisphere. Nothosaurs could grow as long as seven metres (although much of that was neck and tail) and hunted the shallow waters around the coasts. Like their better-known sauropterygian cousins the plesiosaurs, they propelled themselves through ancient seas using four flat paddles, snatching fish and squid in sharp, conical teeth. Hamish Campbell, of GNS Science, found the large vertebra in 1978, in the Mount Harper/Mahaanui area. GNS loaned the fossil to palaeontologist Ewan Fordyce at the University of Otago, and there it stayed, carefully labelled and shelved, for nearly three decades. In 2017, Fordyce showed the fossil to Benjamin Kear, a Swedish marine reptile specialist he was collaborating with. Kear knew he was looking at something special, and led a team who have formally described the find in the journal Current Biology. Based on shells in the encasing siltstone, the team determined this animal lived around 246 million years ago, not long after the mass extinction that wiped out 90 per cent of marine life at the end of the Permian period. Such mass extinctions, Kear explains, can drive diversification as new groups race to fill vacant ecological niches. The nothosaur and other sauropterygians, he says, evolved from a land-dwelling ancestor, and this fossil—the earliest sauropterygian ever found in the southern hemisphere—illustrates just how successful they were. “It’s the first clue that not only did these things adapt to live in the oceans very quickly, but they explosively dispersed all around the world.” Kear believes the find also indicates that the remains of many other extinct marine giants are waiting to be discovered here. For Campbell, the discovery highlights the importance of collections. Fossils, he says, may only reveal their importance many years, or in this case decades, after they were collected—when “the right person with the right pair of eyes came along”.
A mycologist on a mission to catalogue all New Zealand’s species of rust has just added another 26 to the list. For Eric McKenzie, the fungal pathogens have been a 55-year passion. Some specimens have been sitting dried and unnamed in Manaaki Whenua—Landcare Research’s fungal collection for decades, but others McKenzie collected himself from shrubs and herbs in bush clearings, high-country grasslands, and islands from the Kermadecs to the subantarctics. The rusts can be quite hard to find, he says. “You’ve got to get down on your hands and knees, stick your bum in the air and crawl around. And then I have to get up again afterwards!” His efforts are rewarded, though, when he sees their bright colours and unique shapes under the microscope—such as Coleosporium puawhananga, pictured here on clematis. “It’s the thrill of the chase,” he says. “You never know quite what you’re going to see.” One of McKenzie’s new rusts, described in New Zealand Journal of Botany, is an exotic that favours fuchsia plants. The other 25 are natives, and go for hosts including karo and the Marlborough rock daisy. Typically, each rust infects a specific species or genus, forming clumps of orange, yellow or brown spores on leaves and stems. Spread on the wind or by passing animals (or people), rust infections can take out whole crops—the ancient Romans had a god of rust, Robigus, and every year sacrificed a puppy to him in the hope of alleviating the damage done by wheat rust. The notorious invader myrtle rust now tearing through New Zealand bush is a particular threat, because unusually, it attacks a wide range of plants, and hits them hard (see ‘The Forgotten Pandemic,’ Issue 188). We now know of around 150 native rusts—but unlike myrtle rust, they cause only minor damage, says McKenzie, as they “all live pretty much in harmony and balance with their host plant”.
Bonsai are teeny-tiny. But for some New Zealanders, they have a way of taking over.
Michael Belgrave, Massey University Press, $65
Crayfish are the great creators and cleanup crew of their freshwater homes. They burrow into banks, unstick gummy sediment, and deal with anything that ends up dead in the water. Plus, they’re delicious. Hundreds of years ago Māori spread these tasty all-rounders from place to place. Can doing the same now help save the species?
For 50 years, punters had one hour every evening to get their booze in. It did not go well.
When you go on a pig hunt in Niue there’s really only one option for dinner. So it was for photographer Richard Robinson and writer Pete McKenzie. After documenting a hunt with Huggard Tongatule, who is leading an ambitious plan to rid the whole island of pests (page 80), they headed back to his place. Tongatule laid out a marvellous spread of perfectly prepared wild boar, uga/coconut crab, and taro. Robinson was in “pork heaven”, says McKenzie. Him not so much. That day he had watched Tongatule shoot and gut the pig and turn a blowtorch on it, burning off the hide and hair and sending enormous bubbles of air beneath the skin. It was a lot, for a vegetarian. But whenever McKenzie is reporting in the Pacific, he knows he’ll be eating meat. The decision is partly about pragmatism, he says—but more importantly, respect. “Being able to take a few bites was a way of saying ‘Thank you’.” Happily, there was enough taro to feed a dozen ravenous journos. Writer Bill Morris, meanwhile, had few qualms about cracking into kōura, or freshwater crays, after a trapping trip with Terressa Shandley Kollat (page 26 and 34). Kollat put together “mountains of food”, Morris says: a pot of kōura, smoked salmon, marinated venison, and fresh breadrolls to mop it all up. The crays were trickier to get into than their big salty cousins, Morris says—but worth it. “They were sweet and delicious. I thought they tasted better than marine crayfish, actually.”
Wellington journalist Michelle Duff tackles the big stuff: racism, sexual abuse, the deep, dangerous inequities ambient in our education and health systems. What this means is that she has spent 15 years asking people about the worst traumas of their lives. Or, as she described it in a recent piece for 1News, “sitting at their kitchen tables with a cup of tea cooling beside your notebook as they describe the unfathomable—the death of a child, the rape of their daughter… gripping the dark nebulous cloud of their grief and sieving it into readable black and white”. It gets to you after a while, the anxiety, the sadness. Connecting with nature, Duff realised, is just about the only thing that helps. Surfing especially. Her board came with her to Tairāwhiti, of course (page 90). She got in the water at Wainui and Makorori. It helped soothe the ache of what she and photographer Brennan Thomas had been documenting: “Climate change in real time, threatening whole communities… Seeing some of the damage visually actually scared the shit out of me. “I also got my first ‘Kia ora!’ in the waves,” Duff says, “from a wāhine Māori surfer in Makorori who was absolutely owning a break I was terrified by.”
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