Fifty-nine Christmases ago, 10-year-old Andrew Penniket unwrapped a snorkel, mask and flippers. It was a transformative gift. Now, in a memoir, Penniket recounts his adventure-filled career of underwater cinematography—and makes a passionate case for marine conservation.
We have secured the future of New Zealand Geographic. Again.
On paper, Wellington city’s not looking too flash. But photographer Louis Elorfi Macalister finds life—loud, colourful, and dynamic—on every corner.
All around you, animals are building, burrowing or stealing dwellings for themselves and their families. For others, home is a state of mind.
In first-year philosophy we chewed over the theory that humans were most interested in watching water, fire, and sky. The idea always irked me. What about a dune of tussock rippling in the wind? Seagull fights? Bumblebees in tomato flowers? Recently, I read an essay by American poet and minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, called ‘Nature’. He writes about the power of observing nature; how doing so can transform, for a moment, the human experience. He watches it all and he is entranced: the stars, the woods, a river, sunlight, seashells, pinecones, winter. “Crossing a bare common,” he writes, “in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.” Emerson wrote that essay two centuries ago. It endures. It felt almost fearsomely big, exultant, to stand with my family on a boat ramp on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula this spring and watch bioluminescence light up the night-time sea. Glowing waves peeled across the horizon, smashed against the rocks. Great sudsy swirls of electric blue washed over our gumboots. Glowboots, we call them now. A lot of conservation work is about watching. Protracted, deliberate noticing. The scientific term is monitoring, but I suspect that sometimes, when what you’re monitoring is decline, it can feel like bearing witness. In our cover story we meet an expert and instinctive observer. Jody Weir is a marine biologist with the Department of Conservation and monitors the fur seal colony at Kaikōura. The past few seasons have been rough. But her dedicated watching is getting results: her findings are firing up funding and scientific attention, helping us better understand the fur seals as well as the threats they’re facing. When members of the public see what Weir is seeing—starving pups, especially—they are often bewildered that she doesn’t just feed them up. That’s not a long-term solution. Weir argues that the best we can do, for those pups, is continue to pay attention. Our story, funded in part by reader donations (a first for New Zealand Geographic) is published in that spirit. There are lighter ways of watching the world, of course. You can just walk out into it and… look. Writer and illustrator Giselle Clarkson, who works on our Just So column each issue, is all about coaxing young people to notice the living wonders pottering around right under their noses. Funny-looking snail shells (see page 8). Ant trails. The shape of a sparrow’s wing. How it’s different from the wing of a goose. Her latest book focuses on birds, but her particular way of winkling out wonder in the mundane—and holding it up so the rest of us can see it, too—is there even when she’s illustrating recipe books or old Joy Cowley stories. I have learned over the past few years that watching the world like Clarkson does can balance the weight of that other, more grim kind of observation. And the truly wonderful thing is that it gets better all the time. Plant nerds talk about “green blindness”—they mean the time before, when you thought a tree was just a tree and not a tōtara covered in mosses and liverworts and lichens and epiphytes, when you didn’t know to look up as the sun hits the canopy and spangles the spiderwebs, when you would have missed the pūriri moth on the trunk, and not paused, often, just to watch.
Every year, the finest sheep dogs and handlers in New Zealand and Australia compete for the prestigious Wayleggo Cup. The air is thick with expletives, the sheep are ready to bolt, and every second matters.
Almost all sponges live in the sea, “and they’re the kind that people know about”, as University of Otago palaeontologist Daphne Lee says. But a team led by her German collaborator Uwe Kaulfuss has just discovered something very special in sediment from Otago’s Foulden Maar: an exquisitely preserved, fossilised freshwater sponge, the first to be described in New Zealand or Australia. The soft material is gone—it has been 23 million years, after all—and what remains are the tiny, needle-like “spicules” of silica that function as a sponge’s skeleton. “I think they are beautiful,” Lee says. “It’s really quite something.”
King’s Counsel Sally Gepp on the frustrating, high stakes, necessary work of environmental law.
Horse mussels are massive. Given a chance, the shellfish can grow to almost half a metre long. University of Auckland marine scientist Jenny Hillman says that until the 1990s, these huge shellfish carpeted harbours and estuaries around New Zealand, cleaning the seawater as they filtered it. They were big builders, too: forming reefs that bound sediment, captured nutrients, and provided habitat for many smaller creatures. However, Hillman says, these areas are now largely stripped of life and horse mussels are functionally extinct. Commercial dredging, which destroys seafloor habitat, has been the main culprit, while sediment pouring off the land has smothered the beds. Hillman’s team recently received government funding to begin filling the ecological gap left by the enormous mussels. “We’ve decided to make fake ones,” she says. The plan is to use shell waste from green-lipped-mussel farms to create a concrete which can then be shaped to mimic horse-mussel shells—a way to recycle some of the 35,000 tons of green-lipped-mussel shells sent to landfill each year. Out of water, these mimics look a bit like chalky lollipops or garden trowels. But the hope is that they will rebuild the lost seafloor habitat. The first residents are likely to be young fish, such as snapper, and shellfish, such as scallops. The researchers hope that, eventually, the fake mussels will play nursery to real horse mussels—juveniles, grown in captivity and released in their forebears’ old haunts. Scientists are already working on better understanding horse mussel reproduction with a view to breeding them, Hillman says. And in the meantime, getting on with restoring the seabed is urgent. “The sooner we get onto it, the better. We cannot look away any more.”
Since the 1850s, two per cent of marine mammal species have gone extinct. But if we look at the biomass—if we add up everything that makes up whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, dugongs, manatees, and sea otters—then the amount of these wild animals has dropped by 70 per cent, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. Most of this decline is due to whaling, while the amount of seals and sea lions is estimated to have remained steady. Estimates are all we have: these numbers are good guesses based on limited catch records and population surveys. Over the same time, the biomass of humans increased by 700 per cent. That’s partly because the numbers of humans soared, and partly because humans have become individually larger. Scientists are a lot more certain about this estimate, as humans are easier to count (and weigh) than whales.
The bird with a big mouth. The bird who leads the flock. The bird who announces the day. The bird who sounds the alarm. The dark bird. The rare bird. The noble, silly, insomniac parrot we’re going to have to learn to live with, all over again.
On the road before the clean running of an EV makes up for the emissions created during its manufacture, according to scientists at Duke University in the US. The cars get off to a messy start because of emissions caused by mining lithium and building the battery. But across an EV’s lifespan, the scientists calculate, its “footprint”—in terms of damage to the climate and air quality—is two to three times smaller than that of a car running on fossil fuels.
Scientists who spent nine years birdwatching in Wellington ecosanctuary Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne report that birds visit the flowers of kōtukutuku, our native tree fuchsia, 16.4 times an hour. That put it streaks ahead of any other plant in the forest, including tasty stalwarts kōwhai and harakeke. Seven species of native birds, especially tūī, bellbirds and hihi, got stuck into fuchsia nectar. Each left with a pretty pat of blue pollen on the head. The resulting fruits, too, were gobbled by birds, stretching the fuchsia’s snackable content across almost eight months. Tirth Vaishnav, who co-wrote a New Zealand Journal of Ecology paper about the data (with his colleague at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Kevin Burns) says the work shows the “funky” flowers are “absolutely one of the most important resources” at Zealandia. But he’s never noticed kōtukutuku outside of the ecosanctuary and another important Wellington reserve, Ōtari Wilton’s Bush—perhaps because possums, too, find it delicious. He advises any gardeners planting a cornucopia of fuchsia to also set a few traps.
For many Māori, archaeology has a bad name, with treasures removed to museums, stripped of context and spiritual care. Now, as rising seas threaten ancestral places, one iwi is leading digs themselves.
The bone belonged to a songbird, but it didn’t belong to any existing New Zealand songbird, alive or dead, and so Elizabeth Steell was stumped. Steell, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, is one of the world’s few experts in prehistoric songbirds. The bone had been excavated from the archaeological site at St Bathans in Otago, then kept in a box along with other puzzling bird parts in Te Papa until Steell picked it up to investigate. It was a little bit smaller than a toothpick, and it was a foot: “The bit where the toes articulate is preserved really, really well,” she says. Steell began comparing the mystery foot to other songbird species around the world, and that’s when she found a match. It was very similar in shape to a bowerbird bone, and not just a passing resemblance, either; it had a combination of distinctive features that bowerbird feet have. There are no bowerbirds in New Zealand. They live in more tropical places—Australia and New Guinea—where they are famous for building complicated structures out of twigs and then dancing in front of them. Some decorate their bowers with blue items, others with moss, flowers and berries, and others with a ring of leaves silver-side up. The effect is part romantic, part occultic. The mystery foot shares similarities with Sericulus bowerbirds (pictured), which build “avenue bowers”: parallel walls of twigs enclosing a walkway. Did we once have a prehistoric bowerbird? Steell needs more bones. She’s hoping to return to the box of bird parts, certain there’s more to find: bowerbird proof, perhaps, or other surprise species. “There’s so much that hasn’t been described around the world,” she says, “and New Zealand is one of these places”.
Last year, they were hit with a deadly virus. The year before that, starvation. What will this breeding season bring for the thousands of fur seals hauled up on our coasts?
In 2019, scientists asked the public to catch and freeze mosquitoes, then post them to Te Papa. Over three years almost 900 tiny packages turned up. About a third of the insects weren’t mosquitoes at all, or they were too damaged (squashed?) to identify. Of the rest, two exotic species dominate. Julia Kasper, lead curator of invertebrates at Te Papa, says both are invasive and favour urban areas—and bite people—while our 13 native species, shown here in green, mostly prefer birds and deep bush. Two others, which she calls “the coolest mosquitoes in the world”, ducked the census entirely: Opifex fuscus breeds in rockpools, targets mammals and has a vicious bite. And Culex rotoruae breeds in hot, poisonous thermal pools—the only mosquito known to do so.
For years, scientists have been using water samples to trace plants, microbes, animals and fungi via the invisible bits of DNA they leave behind. Recently this eDNA technology has taken to the air, using spiderwebs to catch clues wafting on the breeze. But scaling that up would be rough on spiders. And one web is not like another, making it a difficult medium. So scientists at the University of Waikato decided to test toy spiderwebs. The team popped into a $2 shop for their high-tech supplies, sterilised the artificial webbing, then stretched it over coat hangers and hung the lot in a gazebo on a lifestyle block in Palmerston North. The place was bristling with life: farm animals, pests, native bush and farmland, even an aviary of exotic birds. After five days, the scientists took the toy webs back to the lab (first, carefully removing the spiders that had turned up). They also took samples from a stream on the property and collected nearby natural webs for analysis, twirling the wild silk onto pipettes like candy floss. Each medium—water, toy webs, and real ones—held a rich and diverse library of eDNA, and the fake webs had caught whispers of dozens of species missed by the others, including zebra finch, cow, chook, horsefly, tōtara, pinkgill mushroom, grey parrot, flax, sheep and clover. “It’s surprising how much trace DNA there is in the environment,” says Angela McGaughran, one of the scientists. The fake webs could eventually be built more precisely and consistently, she says, and help trace species such as “birds, bats and non-aquatic insects” that water sampling can miss. McGaughran has been to Antarctica multiple times for other research, and now wonders whether one day a trace of her will ping up on an eDNA test there.
Most dairy cows in New Zealand are Friesians—the ones with black spots dappling white backs and bellies. Figuring out which genes dictate these markings was particularly devilish, but after analysing thousands of coat patterns, an international team of scientists have done it, publishing their findings in Science Advances. It was like winning a race, says animal geneticist Matt Littlejohn, a professor at Massey University. He says the payoffs are more than aesthetic: fiddling with these genes could let farmers avoid markings that can lower a crossbred cow’s value. And if a cow could be draped in more black, that could protect her from sunburn (although it could also make her hotter). But the extent of these tweaks will be determined by how spots fall naturally—so no, we’re not going to see a dairy herd tricked out in corporate branding any time soon, Littlejohn says with some relief.
Edited by Athol McCredie, Te Papa Press, $90
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