The Voice of Tangaroa
93% of New Zealand is covered in salt water. 80% of our biodiversity is in our seas. And yet this is the part of our realm we understand the least and treat the worst. Today, attitudes are turning from harvest to heritage, and extraction to investment.
The stuff of life
There are places in our seas where the great, whirring cogs of the world hold still. Where the process of decay pauses—for your lifetime, for your children’s, longer—and carbon sleeps, tucked safely away in the sludge. In New Zealand these places are the fiords, the ocean deeps, and the spongy, muddy fringes of our coastlines. And we’re only just beginning to understand them.
Podcast: The stuff of life
To avert the worst of the climate crisis we need to reduce our emissions. One way is to phase out fossil fuels, to leave forms of carbon like oil and gas locked up in the ground. But we can also look at ways to lock up more carbon, long term. And some options for this are in our oceans.
Podcast: Fish out of water
Many of our fisheries are under pressure. At the same time people are eating more fish. Could farming iconic New Zealand species be the future? And what are the advantages of growing fish on land?
Fish out of water
People and livestock gobble so much fish that the seas soon won’t keep up. Is the answer to grow fish on land? After decades of research, scientists are cracking the secrets to commercially tank-rearing a handful of New Zealand’s iconic ocean creatures—pāua, whitebait, kingfish and hāpuku.
Podcast: The undersea orchestra
Crackle, pop, woof, crunch, click. Beneath the roar of the surf, an undersea orchestra is in full swing.
Podcast: Kina-nomics
The kina are out of control. As many as 40 urchins crowd into a single square metre of rock, devoid of other life. A kina barren is a symptom of an ecosystem out of balance. Could we eat our way to a solution?
Eyes in the sky
Modern vessels bristle with advanced navigation and communication equipment, and yet human activity in our seas is not well quantified, largely because the location data is shared privately rather than publicly, or not broadcast at all. This makes it hard to understand the impact of fishing, transport and energy sectors on the environment, and indeed on the expansion of the two trillion-dollar blue economy. To understand the movements of these “dark vessels”, researchers from Global Fishing Watch analysed two million gigabytes of satellite data using three deep-learning models to recognise fishing vessels and compared it with the GPS positions from 53 billion public AIS messages. The
Kina-nomics
The market—and human appetite—are often to blame for ecosystem destruction. But in the case of kina barrens, they might be part of the solution.
The sonar trap
Every time there’s a stranding—especially when dozens of whales or dolphins run aground, such as in Mahia last month—we mourn, and wonder what drives the phenomenon. Scientists can’t answer that with certainty yet: strandings are ethically, logistically and financially tricky to study. But in general, there are a few key theories. Cetaceans can get into trouble while fleeing predators, or hunting in the shallows. Rough seas, dirty water, and loud noises can interfere with their hearing and vision. Sometimes, sick or dying whales are drawn to calm coastlines, and in groups with strong social bonds, entire pods may stick by the sick animals, even at the cost of their own lives.
Death of a titan
This summer, New Zealand photographer Rob Suisted was working as a polar guide on a trip to Antarctica. Off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula the ship approached A23a—the largest iceberg in the world (for now). “You look at this thing and you can only see a fraction of it, both in its vastness and its depth. It just defies comprehension,” Suisted says. A23a is 280 metres thick, weighs a trillion tonnes, and sprawls across 3900 square kilometres—three-quarters the size of the entire Auckland region. When giants like this throw their weight around, they transform the surrounding seas: they generate currents, change the water’s salinity, smash up icy coastlines, gouge t
The seafloor stores carbon, but trawling releases it
A new study reveals that New Zealand’s huge ocean territory contains two billion tons of carbon, locked in the seafloor. If we want to fight climate change, it might be a good idea to keep it there.
The special case of our smallest dolphins
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?
Bottom feeding
When humans fish, we tend to go after the big fish first—the meaty, confident predators that are easy to catch. Tuna, swordfish, crayfish, snapper. As those become rarer, we move on to the next-biggest fish, and finally on to the grazers, like kina. This phenomenon has been dubbed “fishing down the food web”, and it’s a problem all over the world: “You take the top predators out of any ecosystem and you disrupt the balance,” says University of Auckland marine scientist Andrew Jeffs. An international group of scientists analysed 70 years of New Zealand fisheries data and found the pattern holds here, too. As bigger fish became harder to find close to shore, fishers started catc
Counting the dead
Record low Antarctic sea ice in the spring of 2022 caused four emperor penguin colonies to suffer “catastrophic breeding failure”. Since 2009, Peter Fretwell and colleagues from the British Antarctic Survey have used satellite imagery to monitor penguin colonies at five remote sites in the Bellingshausen Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula. These birds have never seen a human, but we can detect the brown staining of their poo from space. The scientists estimate about 9000 chicks typically hatch on the ice here each spring, with 6000-8000 surviving to fledge in December. But in 2022, Fretwell watched anxiously as the waves edged closer to the animals. Well before the chicks had develo
Life in plastic
In the North Pacific off the coast of California, ocean currents and winds concentrate humanity’s detritus in a plastic soup around six times the size of New Zealand. It’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In 2019, a French long-distance swimmer named Benoît Lecomte embarked on an 80-day, 300-nautical-mile swim through the patch. While he mostly ploughed through suspended specks of microplastic, Lecomte also encountered items such as toothbrushes, bottles and fishing nets littering the sea surface. We now suspect life was here well before the plastic arrived: new research suggests that tiny surface-floating organisms such as jelly-like blue buttons, violet sea snails and by
Taking on water
New Zealand once led the world in marine protection. Now our underwater ecosystems are bottoming out. Why is stopping fishing so politically fraught? How might our ideas about marine protection need to change? And why, when our seas are in such desperate need, is it taking us so long to learn to talk to each other?
The future of the world is written in penguin blood
Erect-crested penguins are one of the most mysterious birds on the planet. We have little idea how many there are, what they eat, where they forage, or how their environment may be changing as the Southern Ocean warms. No one has even visited the Bounty Islands where they breed in three years. Scientist Thomas Mattern chartered a yacht and mounted a mission to answer some of these urgent questions before it’s too late.
Stealth attack
It was only a matter of time. In May, kaitiaki Rana Rewha (Ngāti Kuta) found 10 small clumps of fluffy green algae on the beach at Omakiwi Cove in the Bay of Islands, and raised the alarm. The clusters were exotic caulerpa—the invasive tropical seaweed first discovered at Aotea/Great Barrier in 2021, now detected on the mainland. Divers searched the waters nearby and soon found swathes of it at a dozen sites, the 16-hectare infestation suggesting the underwater weed had been quietly trespassing for several years already. Later, extensive surveillance dives discovered 200 hectares in the Bay of Islands had been infiltrated to varying degrees. This month, Biosecurity New Zealand and m
Sharks are no chilly gillies
Fish are cold-blooded, meaning they rely on their surroundings to regulate their body temperature. So how do hammerhead sharks—which frequently dive deep to hunt—maintain a constant body temperature when they’re in the frigid depths? Turns out scalloped hammerheads hold their breath. Scientists tracking seven of the sharks off Hawai’i found that the predators likely close their gill slits on deep dives to preserve body heat—the first time this behaviour has been observed in fish. The discovery was “a complete surprise”, according to the study’s lead author, Mark Royer. “Although it is obvious that air-breathing marine mammals hold their breath while diving, we did no
A clean sweep?
Every year, New Zealand vessels drag trawl gear across nearly 100,000 square kilometres of our seafloor. We are the only nation still trawling on the high seas of the South Pacific. Can we make bottom trawling better? Or should we ban it altogether?
Teen spirit
It’s a teenager’s life for young sea lions in the Auckland Islands: not yet battling over mates, they’re free to wrestle, snooze—and accost photographers.
Inside the alien brain
For the first time ever, scientists have recorded the brainwaves of freely moving octopuses—tracking three big blue octopuses (Octopus cyanea) through 12 hours of sleeping, eating, and swimming around a tank. Some of the trio’s brain activity patterns resembled those of mammals. But researchers also identified a long-lasting, slow oscillation that didn’t seem to match any particular behaviour and which they’d never seen before. They think it may represent memory or learning processes. The octopus mind is an intriguing subject for neuroscientists, since the invertebrates display behaviour linked to intelligence—such as tool use, playing, and distinct personalities. Yet, the mollu
The big blue banquet
At sea, the feasts are grand and impromptu—and everyone’s invited.
Kelp babies can’t take the heat
As climate change sends sea temperatures soaring, our lush underwater forests of kelp are disappearing (see Issue 176, Jul/Aug 2022). Now, University of Otago scientists have homed in on exactly how the heat impacts the microscopic life-cycle stages of New Zealand’s iconic rimurimu giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera). Like a fern, rimurimu reproduces by releasing spores. These then nestle into a crevice and grow into a germ tube, before entering the sexual stage of development. By turning up the heat on rimurimu samples in the lab, scientists found that higher temperatures triggered the release of more spores. But, once released, the hotter conditions led to significant declines in the
Sunfish have pretty sweet moves, actually
To an orca, a sunfish is a bit like a watermelon: a nutritious, watery snack, but hard to swallow whole. Also like watermelons, sunfish (also called mola) don’t bite back. This makes them the ideal “training prey” for juvenile orcas, according to New Zealand orca scientist Ingrid Visser. In the first-ever review of orca-sunfish interactions, Visser, along with sunfish researcher Marianne Nyegaard and orca researcher London Fletcher, found several instances of juvenile-parent orca pairs hunting sunfish. About 40 per cent of the dozens of photos, videos and oral accounts they analysed didn’t appear to be about predation, but simply entertainment. Orcas flung sunfish like frisbees
State of cray
The crayfish population in the Hauraki Gulf is in worse shape than official fishery stock assessments suggest, according to a new analysis. Researchers from the University of Auckland used two marine reserves— Cape Rodney-Okakari Point (Goat Island) and Tāwharanui—as “proxies” for natural, unfished crayfish abundance. “We hired a fisherman and all of his gear and we did cray potting inside and outside the marine reserve for two years,” says Benn Hanns, lead author of the paper. Comparing catch rates inside and outside the marine reserves indicates that the crayfish population has plummeted to around two to three per cent of unfished levels—though Hanns suggests the populati
Minister’s decision found “unlawful”
The NGO Environmental Law Initiative (ELI) took the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries to the High Court in October, challenging the decision on the total allowable catch of crayfish in Northland. (As part of a no-holds-barred commitment to oceans journalism, New Zealand Geographic was involved in preparing and presenting the case.) ELI contended that the advice to the minister was “inaccurate, misleading, and unsupported by peer-reviewed and published literature”, and that the minister had failed to consider the “interdependence of species” in the marine environment that ultimately leads to trophic collapse—the kina barrens that New Zealand Geographic reported on in November 20
Plastic Archaeology
If you sail west from California for nearly a week you’ll end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Then the plastic starts bobbing past—a buoy, a bucket, a net, a toothbrush, microplastics floating like bubbles—tens of thousands of tonnes of it spread over an estimated 1.6 million square kilometres.
Clicky cliques
Sperm whales are tribal creatures—and they avoid interacting with those from other clans, even when they share the same waters. But how do they identify each other?
Mussel building
One day in 2008, marine science student Kura Paul-Burke was diving in Ōhiwa’s murky waters when the grey-brown of the sea floor suddenly gave way to a brilliant orange. At first, she was struck by the beauty of it. Then she realised she was looking at hundreds of thousands of 11-armed sea stars—pātangaroa, a native species—stacked five or six layers deep. Behind them, the seabed was littered with empty green-lipped mussel shells. In 2007, the Bay of Plenty harbour was home to an estimated 112 million mussels. By 2019, only 78,000 were left. Paul-Burke’s Ngāti Awa elders had noticed signs of decline well before then. No-one knew why the mussels were dying. Was it overharvest
Killer algae
The invasive seaweed Caulerpa brachypus was discovered in New Zealand just over a year ago, and it promises to ruin everything. On Aotea/Great Barrier Island, people are sacrificing their way of life in an attempt to contain the weed—and stop it reaching the mainland.
Stingrays: not so dumb
Sharks and rays are considered to be strong, silent types—they possess no voice boxes, or other anatomical structures associated with vocal communication. Or so we thought. Then Spanish photographer J. Javier Delgado Esteban filmed a juvenile mangrove whipray (Urogymnus granulatus) while he was snorkelling off Magnetic Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. When Esteban approached, the ray made loud clicks. Each sound visibly coincided with a contraction of its spiracles—openings behind the eyes that rays use to aid breathing. Marine ecologist Lachlan Fetterplace saw the video on Instagram, contacted Esteban, and started investigating. They assembled anecdotal reports a
How did penguins get so great?
Penguins traded in their wings for flippers more than 60 million years ago, long before there were icesheets in Antarctica. But aeons of evolution turned them into supremely adapted marine hunters, capable of diving deep and withstanding extreme cold.
The Kelp
Where do young sea creatures spend their first weeks? What’s at the root of oceanic food chains? Kelp forests are to Aotearoa what coral reefs are to other marine ecosystems. Or they used to be.
How did we fall so far behind?
In 1975, New Zealand established the world’s first marine reserves, which became the gold standard for marine conservation and environmental outcomes. Half a century later we lag far behind the rest of the world in protecting our marine estate—an approach more similar to Russia and China than states most Kiwis would consider hold similar environmental values. New Zealand has not commited to the United Nations goal of 30% marine protection by 2030 and the Labour government has failed to meet its own goal of 10% protection by 2020. “For decades New Zealand has played an important role in ocean governance, opposing whaling, reducing by-catch and advocating for the elimination of fis
Blue sharks have a propensity for romance, getting caught, and never crossing the equator.
Blue sharks swim in all the world’s oceans, and a new study reveals surprising stories about their migrations and behaviour. For his doctoral research at the University of Auckland, Riley Elliott carefully attached satellite tags to 15 blue sharks—11 males and four females—in the waters off northeastern New Zealand between 2012 and 2015. With limited funding available for the expensive tags, Elliott turned to community groups and individuals, the sponsors following the animals’ movements online. In some cases, the tag stayed attached for at least a year. One shark travelled more than 14,000 kilometres from New Zealand to the Pacific Islands and Indonesia and back. Another dived to
Seabirds bring nutrients from the ocean to the land. Now they’re bringing plastic, too.
Dan Burgin was holding the flesh-footed shearwater chick when it vomited a hard white square of plastic—and stinky stomach oil—over Simon Lamb. The two ecologists, from the consultancy Wildlife Management International, were on predator-free Ohinau Island, off the eastern side of the Coromandel Peninsula, collecting data on the shearwater breeding season. They couldn’t help noticing the plastic scattered around the seabird colonies, especially near the shearwaters’ burrows. The rubbish wasn’t jettisoned by humans—Ohinau Island requires a permit to visit—but by the birds themselves. Seabirds perform a vital ecosystem role of bringing nutrients from the ocean to the land. Now,
Hot stuff
This past summer was a scorcher, not just on land but in the sea, too. In some of New Zealand’s coastal waters, temperatures reached four degrees higher than normal, while in the Bay of Plenty, a marine heatwave began in November and continued into March. Globally, marine heatwaves have bleached coral, flattened kelp forests, changed whales’ behaviour, wiped out fisheries, and allowed invasive species to spread. They can also cause problems for aquaculture, says MetOcean’s João de Souza, director of The Moana Project, which tracks ocean temperatures around New Zealand and forecasts marine heatwaves one week ahead to help companies farming salmon, mussel and oysters to prepare. (A m
The undersea orchestra
A symphony is taking place beneath the waves, as many different animals call to each other, scare off predators, stun their prey, or munch on algae. What happens when humans drown them out?
Big blue catch
The attack is already underway when the researchers find the blue whale. A huge chunk of flesh has been ripped from its nose, its dorsal fin has been bitten off, and teeth rake scratches scar its body. Still, the whale tries to flee from its attackers. About a dozen orcas continue their hunt, and after 20 minutes, the whale is bleeding profusely. The end is near. Three orcas line up to deliver the fatal blow, ramming into its flank and forcing the whale under. One orca noses her way into the behemoth’s mouth and begins to feed on its tongue. Over the next six hours, around 50 killer whales converge on the 20-metre-long carcass for a blubbery feast. This is the first authenticated record
So long, and thanks for all the fish
Where do Tamatea/Dusky Sound’s dolphins go? Starting in 2009, researchers spent a decade trying to find out, setting out 178 times in small boats in all seasons to track and identify the sound’s resident bottlenose dolphins—around 120 of them. They found that the animals preferred to hang out in certain parts of the vast waterway, and that they particularly liked Te Puaitaha/Breaksea Sound (the long fiord at the north end of Dusky Sound) and the Bowen Channel (between Resolution and Long Islands). However, from 2016 to 2018, the dolphins began to leave Breaksea Sound. Fiordland may be one of the wildest places in New Zealand, but human presence is increasing. The researchers susp
Illegal fishing decreases, but some legit fishers are ignoring the rules.
A study by the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency of illegal, unreported and unregulated tuna fishing has found that the problem may not be as bad as was feared. It estimated that between 2017 and 2019, 192,000 tonnes of tuna worth more than US$300 million was caught each year in the Pacific Islands region by people not following fisheries rules—down from 300,000 tonnes in the 2016 estimate. “The assumption that unlicensed fishing is rampant has been proven false,” says Auckland-based fisheries consultant Francisco Blaha, who contributed to the report. Only five percent of the dodgy dealings involved unlicensed fishing boats. Most—89 per cent—involved licensed operators misr
Star-crossed albatrosses
Divorce is a possibility for any socially monogamous species, from humans to seabirds. Typically, birds split up after breeding failures, allowing them to find a more suitable match. In the case of albatrosses, new research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that climate change may increase divorce rates in couples who otherwise would have stayed together, with population-wide ramifications. Starting in 2003, international researchers tracked the mating behaviour and breeding success of black-browed albatrosses on the Falkland Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean. They found that the divorce rates varied considerably from year to year, ranging between 0.8 and 7.7 p
Wrecked penguins
As this issue went to print, hundreds of kororā had been found washed up dead in separate events along Te Oneroa-a-Tōhē/Ninety Mile Beach and other beaches in the Far North, in what are called penguin wrecks. The Department of Conservation says little blue penguins are dying as a result of the summer’s marine heatwave, which makes it harder for them to find food. Read more at nzgeo.com/penguins
Catching rays
How hard could it be to find a manta ray? They’re six metres wide, after all.
“We were really worried they would all die.”
The steep underwater walls of Fiordland’s sounds are home to a lush ecosystem of sponges, corals, and algae in camouflage shades of green and brown. Last summer, divers in Te Puaitaha/Breaksea Sound working to control the spread of the invasive seaweed Undaria noticed something unusual: the Cymbastela lamellata sponges dotted all over the cliffs were bleached a bright white. “Once you see one, you just see them everywhere—as far as you can see,” says diver Millie Mannering. It’s the first time sponge bleaching has been observed in New Zealand, affecting millions or even tens of millions of individual animals. It’s likely the result of last summer’s marine heatwave, when ocea
Hungry, hungry humpbacks
Baleen whales eat three times as much food as we previously thought they did, according to a nine-year-long study published in the journal Nature. This means whales poo a lot more, too, with important implications for ocean ecosystems. Researchers used data from 321 tagged whales from seven species—including blue, minke, fin, and humpback whales—swimming in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern oceans. The tags tracked the animals’ movements, allowing the scientists to identify telltale feeding patterns. They used drones to photograph 105 whales and determine their lengths, then calculated how much water each could take in with a single mouthful. And they raced out to whale-feeding si
Champion Divers
Black-browed albatrosses dive deeper and longer for kai than previously thought. The were believed to be shallow surface divers, but new data shows they can dive up to 19 metres and for as long as 52 seconds. Equipping 28 black-browed albatrosses with GPS backpacks and mini leg-mounted depth loggers, researchers tracked the birds’ foraging trips off the coast of the Falkland Islands. More than 20 per cent of dives recorded surpassed the previous record (around six metres) while 50 per cent of birds reached depths of 10 metres. This finding means that longlines used in commercial fishing probably need to be set at even greater depths to avoid accidentally snaring albatrosses. The rese
Life under ice
A colony of icefish (Neopagetopsis ionah) 60 million nests in size swathes the seafloor of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, researchers have found in an unprecedented discovery. Previously, the largest known icefish colony consisted of 60 nests. The research team was collecting routine seafloor data using a towed camera, and recorded about four to five hours of fish nests. The city-sized colony, which stretches for 240 kilometres, likely plays an important role in the entire Weddell Sea ecosystem. Gravel-bottomed nests dot the seafloor. Nestled within each hollow, pale blue eggs are guarded by an icefish parent. In another unexpected Weddell Sea discovery, researchers from the British Antar
Minerals in the deep
In February, three mining companies were granted permission to explore the Cook Islands’ submarine wealth: lumps packed with rare metals on the sea floor. What has the tiny Pacific nation got to lose?
A tragedy of the commons
Land is owned, but the sea is shared. And we haven’t been sharing very well.
The whales are back
Last century, southern right whales were hunted until there were none left—none that we could find. A small group of these whales, also called tohorā, hid from the harpoon. Deep in the subantarctic, the survivors birthed and nursed their young. Now, tohorā are returning to the coasts of New Zealand. Are we ready for them?
Tuna vs minerals
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 affectin
Whose teeth?
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, S
Billion dollar fish
Tuna are the gold of the ocean—and, because certain species are so sought-after, they’ve become synonymous with overfishing and modern slavery. But in some areas, populations that were teetering on the edge of total wipe-out seem to be making a tentative comeback. Are things finally turning around for these fisheries?
The price of fish
Are there plenty more fish in the sea? Reports of falling hoki stocks off the West Coast and the near-disappearance of crayfish from the Hauraki Gulf suggest that our ‘best in the world’ fisheries management may not be living up to the hype. Three decades ago, the right to catch and sell fish became a property right, one that has now accumulated in the hands of a few. How has that worked out for people—and for fish?
How to fix the Marlborough Sounds
Since human arrival, this landscape has undergone dramatic changes—mostly in the form of losses. Here’s how we can protect and nurture what remains.
Castaways
Life is constantly in motion around the world, floating across oceans and colonising new shores, as frequently today as it did hundreds of millions of years ago. So what’s arriving along New Zealand’s coastlines?
Sea change
“The sea has all our dreams,” writes Keri Hulme. For some, those dreams are of strange and wonderful creatures, such as you might find 70 metres below the surface at the Poor Knights Islands. For others, the dreams are of the ocean’s untapped riches: minerals, fossil fuels, sea creatures, energy. Which dreams will prevail in 21st-century Aotearoa?
A song for Pakiri
Laly Haddon and daughter Olivia grew up on the pearly sands of their turangawaewae at Pakiri, and have witnessed radical change.
Songs of the Sea: The hāpuku
Pioneer diver and lifelong environmentalist Wade Doak laments the loss of the hāpuku, our behemoth groper that was once common even in shallow water in the Hauraki Gulf.
No Take Zone
Rolling a fresh cigarette, Bill Ballantine gives a sardonic laugh as he recalls the headline in the local newspaper when New Zealand’s first marine reserve was opened in 1977—“Nothing to do at Goat Island Bay any more.” He had fought for 12 years to protect five square kilometres of marine habitat on the Northland coast. That protection was finally in place. To Ballantine it was the start of a new era. To the newspaper, voicing community opposition, it was the end of one.
Songs of the Sea: The Noises
Sue Neureuter grew up visiting the Noises Islands which have been in her family since the 1930s. Having witnessed the decline in marine life and seabirds in the Hauraki Gulf first-hand she recalls her parents' stories in this personal and vivid account.
Where are all the spotted shags?
Seabird scientists are creating a fake home for shags on the Noises, an island group off the coast of Auckland, in the hope that the Hauraki Gulf’s rapidly diminishing spotted shag population will be fooled into thinking it’s a great place to start a family.
Seas of bounty
Swept by the cold seas of the Southern Ocean, New Zealand’s outposts of the Bounty and Antipodes Islands are awash with life.
Black Tide - the Rena accident and its implications
New Zealanders have become accustomed to sea freight slipping silently in and out of the country’s ports without incident. But on October 5, that impression of well-oiled efficiency foundered on Astrolabe Reef, and our coastlines suddenly seemed acutely exposed. What went wrong?
A song for the crayfish
Pioneer divers Keith and Ailsa Lewis reflect on a lifetime of exploration in the Hauraki Gulf, the abundance of crayfish and their hopes for the future.
How to fix the Hauraki Gulf
The once abundant Hauraki Gulf is on the brink of collapse, and while science is clear on how to repair it, many are putting rights before responsibilities. Here’s what needs to happen.
Why do we need marine reserves?
Ecologist Robert Richmond has been studying reef systems for a lifetime. What has he discovered?
VR: Hauraki Gulf
Experience the Hauraki Gulf in VR on your home computer or phone...
The stink of rotten fish
Revelations about widespread illegal fishing highlight another failure of free-market policy to protect our environment and common assets.
VR: Business as usual
Experience what most of the inner gulf looks like—a relatively modified environment with poor weed coverage and little fish life.
Where the wild things are
Barely seven per cent of New Zealand is land. The rest of it, the wet bit, covers four million square kilometres. In 2016, photographer Richard Robinson won a Canon Personal Project Grant that enabled a dozen expeditions into this vast marine prairie, arguably the country’s last great tract of undisturbed wilderness.
Bill Ballantine, a voice for the sea
The world has lost a great advocate for the marine environment. On Sunday, Bill Ballantine, recognised as the father of marine reserves in this country and a pioneer in global marine conservation, passed away, aged 78.
Smart Talk: Tangaroa and Poseidon - our oceans
With the gods Poseidon and Tangaroa in mind, Wallace Chapman talks with marine scientists Dr Rochelle Constantine and Dr Tom Trnski, the musician Don McGlashan and the CEO of Sustainable Coastlines Sam Judd about the oceans which surround us. Among the many issues they traverse is the complex one of how we protect our marine reserves while still sustaining a fishing industry.
Down under
Sometimes, the world comes to you.
What we do in the shallows
The ocean is our playground, storehouse, transport corridor, driver of weather and coastal change. We’ve learned the hard way that it’s possible for us to exhaust its resources and overwhelm its natural processes. Now, scientists are mapping the web of relationships between the sea, the land and human industry, to figure out how fishing, aquaculture, tourism, land development, and recreation affect its health. What should be permitted, and what prohibited—and where? How can we best strike a balance between using and protecting our seas?
The reel deal
The Tindales hold more than 250 world records.
Treasure Islands
The Biblical tale of three magi with gifts has an ecological equivalent at the Three Kings Islands, 53 kilometres north of the New Zealand mainland. There, swept by the cool waters of the Tasman Sea, life springs in profusion. This year, five agencies voyaged to the islands to explore this unfathomable biological wealth.
Blue Water Islands
A thousand kilometres north-east of the mainland, the Kermadec group basks in a subtropical environment and two decades of marine protection. In May this year, scientists scoured this untouched world to catalogue, collect and expand the list of species found there, and discovered an ecosystem unlike anything else in the country.
The wreck of the penguins
Why did hundreds of dead kororā—little blue penguins—wash up on beaches around the country two summers ago? Has their fate got anything to do with the weather? Or has it got something to do with us?
Empire of the sea
The distant and remote Minerva Reefs—the closest coral atolls to New Zealand—have been the subject of political intrigue, a failed libertarian state and a naval showdown. Scientists believe they may also be the origin of some tropical species reaching New Zealand’s northern waters.
VR: The effect of fishing
An ecosystem out of balance is a desert of monotony. Here at Nordic Reef, snapper and crayfish stocks have been depleted by overfishing, allowing the population kina population to explode and devour all the kelp, sponges and algae.
0.32 leagues under the sea
Marine geologist Cornel de Ronde is filling in the blanks on the map of New Zealand’s submerged territory—and investigating the wealth it may contain.
Poor Knights Islands
New Zealand’s Poor Knights Islands is considered one of the world’s top dive sites and for good reason, with a rich collection of extraordinary characters and bizarre behaviors, including a unique congregation of stingrays and sex-changing Sandagers Wrasse.
Speed Demon
Built for acceleration and power, the shortfin mako is the fastest shark in the world and an icon of New Zealand seas. Although heavily fished for decades by commercial longliners, mako populations are beginning to recover, and prospects look good for this oceanic speedster.
Acid seas
The chemistry of seawater is changing, becoming more acidic, and this transformation is most profound along our coastlines. In this delicate borderland between land and sea, some places are experiencing a surge in acidity, peaking at levels that the open ocean isn’t predicted to reach until the end of this century. What does this mean for marine life?
Rochelle Constantine
Dr Rochelle Constantine recently led an expedition to the Kermadec region to study ocean biodiversity from the deep sea to the surface.
Rachel Constantine is a senior lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, where she focuses her work on the study of cetaceans.
Life on the edge
Like New Zealanders, penguins occupy the margin of land and sea, being dependent on both habitats, and vulnerable to changes in either as well. Their fate is wedded to our coasts, and as scientists have begun to understand, they are a perfect indicator of the health of this fragile boundary too. What can penguins tell us about our seas and shores?
Scientific whaling... like, real science
The Kermadec Islands are a staging post for humpback whales heading from the tropics to feeding grounds in Antarctica that remain unknown. Scientists attempted to intercept them, track them, and discover where they go. Rochelle Constantine, director of the Marine Mammal Ecology Group at the University of Auckland describes how to shoot a whale for science.
The Kermadecs
Alone in the Pacific, halfway to Tonga, sit the Kermadec Islands. This remote archipelago is New Zealand’s northernmost frontier and our toehold on the tropics. Everything that lives on and around these young islands has travelled far to be here and a unique mix of creatures thrive in its warm waters. As a marine community the Kermadec is unrivalled in New Zealand waters.
Gone fishing
The underwater habitat at the Kermadecs is unique in the world, supporting fish life not seen anywhere else, and sharks in abundance. Auckland Museum's Head of Natural Sciences, Tom Trnski, tells us why.
Goat Island
The creatures of New Zealand’s oldest marine reserve are safe from humans, but that doesn’t mean life is easy. They are under constant attack from marauding dolphins, diving cormorants, and the sharks and the marlin that live beyond the boundaries of the reserve.
For the love of sponges
A former editor recalls how he was smitten by deceptively simple creatures.
The Deep
Below the thrashing surface, the depths of our oceans are a wonderland of creatures designed to a very different pattern from anything found on land. In the spirit of the first explorers, French curator Claire Nouvian embarked on an expedition to collect underwater anomalies from our own backyard and exhibit them in the halls of Europe.
Deep trouble
The world’s smallest, rarest dolphin lives in New Zealand. After the expansion of gill-netting in 1970, the population and range of Hector’s dolphin diminished rapidly. One extremely isolated subspecies, Māui dolphin, now numbers barely 100 individuals. Yet science has revealed that the species may yet recover, even from the brink of oblivion.
Stewart Island
Little Blue Penguins run the gauntlet to escape Great White Sharks – but they’re not the only species flirting with death on New Zealand’s famous Stewart Island.
The fortunes of fishing
A glassy sea, an open sky, fish on the bite. An alluring image, but often far from the day-to-day reality faced by small-scale coastal fishermen, who must compete for fewer fish while trying to stay on the right side of increasingly complex government rules. One of the few unregulated fisheries left is tuna, which attracts scores of fishermen to the West Coast each summer to try their luck with line and lure.
Poor Knights, rich seas
French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau rated the Poor Knights Islands off Northland’s east coast as one of the top 10 dive spots in the world. Twenty-five years after they were gazetted a marine reserve, they remain as magnificent as ever, a place of rare undersea richness where exciting biological discoveries continue to be made.