New Zealand’s forests were cleared at a record pace, and from this destruction, a sport arose: who can fell a tree the fastest? Competitive woodchopping transformed the labour of forestry into a community event. Now, 150 years on, a diminishing number of axemen and axewomen chop for top honours at A&P shows around the country.
Some species just like it cooler. Others have withdrawn little by little to higher altitudes, making new homes where it’s too cold for their enemies to follow. But warmer seasons allow predators and diseases to gain ground and advance above the bushline—meaning that the alpine zone is no longer the refuge it once was.
No country has anything quite like New Zealand’s network of backcountry huts, but many of these shelters were at risk of being lost to dilapidation, old age and the ravages of the weather. Now, volunteers around the country are preserving remote huts—and the heritage they represent—for the next generation of trampers.
No portraits exist of one of the most important people in Pacific history. Tupaia was a man of many talents: high priest, artist, diplomat, politician, orator and celestial navigator. After fleeing conflict on his home island of Ra’iātea for Tahiti, he befriended botanist Joseph Banks, and joined the onward voyage of James Cook’s Endeavour. Arriving in New Zealand in 1769, Tupaia discovered he could converse with Māori. He became an interpreter, cultural advisor and bringer of news from islands that Māori had left long ago. 250 years on, we are barely beginning to know who he was.
The Mokohinau stag beetle is one of the world’s most endangered species, occupying less than an acre of scrub on a rocky tower in the middle of the ocean. Its habitat is so precarious that Auckland Zoo and DOC are hoping to safeguard a population of beetles on the mainland as a form of insurance—that is, if there are any left.
Albatrosses and sea lions, little blue penguins and takahē live next door to humans in Dunedin, a city perched on a knot of land on the Otago coastline.
Some people at the Department of Conservation did not want us to tell you about the Mokohinau stag beetle featured in this issue of the magazine. This is why we’ve decided to do so. There have never been many stag beetles on the Mokohinau islands. A lone species has been having a rough time out there, clinging on, somehow managing to survive. Researchers have never seen more than 10 of them at once. The beetle is considered so critically endangered that, in the words of Auckland Zoo reptile and invertebrate expert Don McFarlane, “there needs to be a new version of the word critical”. Their plight is beyond critical. McFarlane’s enthusiasm for the beetle is infectious. I first heard him talk about it when I was working with him on a completely different story. The way he describes the beetle, it sounds like a living marvel. It’s the crazy, far-off relative of the Geodorcus stag beetle family, the wild loner living on a rock in the sea. I wanted to see its knobbly jaws for myself. Then I wanted everyone to see its knobbly jaws. Beetles are the underground workers of our ecosystem, part of the extremely complicated clockwork that keeps our wild habitats ticking along nicely. We don’t know what will happen as more and more of these species disappear. We have a whole taxon of Geodorcus beetles that dispersed across the country and became slightly different from each other, depending on the environments they found themselves in. We don’t know a whole lot about some of them, either. McFarlane is still reeling from the results of the survey. They’ll need to go and take another look, but fellow searcher, ecologist Greg Sherley, is also feeling pessimistic. He’s looked for these beetles before, and found them straight away, at the same time of day and year as this survey took place. Beetles take a long time to become beetles: they spend most of their lifespan as larvae, buried, usually in rotting wood. We don’t know if any larvae still lie in wait on the Mokohinaus. “We’ll never know for sure unless we keep looking, and keep looking long after I’m dead,” says McFarlane. Sherley is worried that, even if beetles remain, there may too few to save the species. Those at DOC who opposed this story did so because they believe publicising the beetle increases the poaching risk to it. But it’s a bit late for poaching. The risk of theft seems like a good reason to start measures to protect the beetle. Though a plan for saving it has long existed, it is only just beginning to be put into action, and in large part due to volunteer effort. Ian Stringer and Greg Sherley, both retired from DOC, paid their passage on the survey and donated their time. We believe it’s important to tell you about this beetle, that it’s special, and that it’s possible for you to advocate for its preservation. You deserve to know that there was a beetle we could have saved—and that we might still save, if we’re lucky. You deserve to know that the cost of conservation budget cuts is paid in beetles. That species are blinking out around us, unknown, unpublicised. You need to know because you vote for these things. In 2009, DOC’s budget was cut by $54 million over four years—particularly bad news for those DOC staff who are enthusiastic about beetles and advocate for their protection. If beetles are on the front line of the global extinction crisis, then entomologists are on the front line of budget cuts. Halting plans to save invertebrates results in the least public outcry, especially if no one knows they’re there in the first place. Beetles need help, and not only from technical experts figuring out how to get them to mate in captivity. They need your help, too.
The largest animals in the ocean weren’t always mammals. They were birds. A newly discovered penguin was the size of a human—1.6 metres tall, weighing 80 kilograms. Its bones were unearthed from the Waipara Greensands in North Canterbury in 2011 by Leigh Love, an amateur palaeontologist. One of the fossils, encased in rock, sat in a display cabinet in Love’s living room for years. “I would use it for the fossil talks I did with school groups coming in,” says Love. “This thing would get passed around the kids: ‘Here’s something that’s about 60 million years old’.” In 2018, Love started to learn fossil preparation—the art of removing the rock to leave the bone exposed. He practised on a crab, then had a go at the penguin leg. It was soon clear it was a new species, dating from a time when penguins ruled the waves. “Marine mammals took 30 million years to evolve, so there was an ‘age of the giant penguins’ in the oceans for 30 million years before finally the whales and seals took over,” says Paul Scofield of Canterbury Museum. “There was a possibility that penguins were going to become whale-size—all the genes for true giganticism are in a bird, because they are dinosaurs. But it never happened, because mammals took over that niche.”
“Cats tamed humans about 4000 years ago, and since then they have cunningly used humans to provide food, comfort and safety, and to aid their dispersal across, and conquest of, most of the world,” write professors John Woinarski, Sarah Legge and Chris Dickman, who lead a major Australian study on the impact of cats on Australian wildlife. Cats are thought to have played a leading role in two-thirds of Australia’s mammal extinctions—that’s 20 species—over the last 200 years. Feral cats are greater killers than pet cats, because pets’ territory is limited by the number of other cats nearby. Cats also pose a threat on the microscopic level: a study by researchers at the University of Adelaide found that feral cats are effective at spreading the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Kangaroos are particularly susceptible to it. In New Zealand, the parasite has been implicated in the deaths of endangered Hector’s and Māui dolphins, but the role it plays is not yet clear.
Albatrosses are good omens for sailors, but are not having too much luck themselves. The population of female wandering albatrosses that nests on Antipodes Island has plummeted by two-thirds in the past 14 years. This rapid decline has alarmed researchers Kath Walker and Graeme Elliott, who have been studying the species for two decades. There appear to be a number of causes, but the primary one is changing oceanic conditions that force the birds to forage in more northerly waters where the risk of being caught by commercial longliners is higher. Some years have seen female mortality rates as high as 20 per cent. “We think about polar bears with despair, but it’s a rather similar sort of situation here,” said Walker in an interview with RNZ. [caption id="attachment_344954" align="alignnone" width="1066"] Numbers of Antipodean albatrosses are declining on the Antipodes.[/caption] Antipodean albatrosses forage for squid, which is also used as bait by the longliners. While many fishers have a suite of techniques and technology to avoid bycatch, those that don’t risk birds taking the hooks and drowning with the sinking line. As Antipodean albatrosses raise only one chick, and both adults provide food during the first year, the loss of a single adult often means the death of its chick too. Antipodean albatrosses range widely—far beyond New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone, into the stateless realm of the high seas and as far east as Chile’s continental shelf. Regional fisheries management organisations regulate fishers out there in a similar way to those in New Zealand waters, but the level of compliance and reporting of bycatch is debatable. Without better data on where the birds are foraging—and dying—researchers are at a loss to determine the threats to the population. There are some 3000 registered longliners in the Pacific, and it’s uncertain which vessels or jurisdictions they interact with. To complicate matters, female Antipodean albatrosses forage further to the north, in more dangerous waters, and are disappearing at a greater rate than the males, leading to a severely skewed sex ratio. The Department of Conservation and the Ministry of Primary Industries deployed about 75 satellite-transmitting devices on Antipodean albatrosses this year, and in association with the Southern Seabirds Solutions Trust, intend to deploy the same number again next season. The tags track the birds’ locations as they forage, and researchers can overlay this data with the position of fishing vessels operating in the area to determine the risk of contact. If left unchecked, the Antipodes Island wandering albatross could be the first albatross species in the world to become functionally extinct.
Carlos Lehnebach has been looking for a ghost orchid for ten years. In July, he found one.
First, you’ll need some ancient seabed that has been buried in the Earth’s crust, cooked up deep down, and then spat out onto the surface. Macquarie University geoscientists studied how diamonds are formed. In experiments recreating the extreme pressures and temperatures found 200 kilometres underground, they demonstrated that seawater in sediment from the bottom of the ocean reacted in the right way to produce the balance of salts found in a diamond. Most diamonds found nearer the Earth’s surface are made this way. “There was a theory that the salts trapped inside diamonds came from marine seawater, but couldn’t be tested,” says lead author Michael Förster. “Our research showed that they came from marine sediment.”
Manta rays have unique patterns of spots on their bellies, allowing individuals to be identified. University of Queensland researchers have created a database of more than 1300 manta rays, supported by a citizen-science project. Scientists are able to keep track of the movements and health of reef manta rays (Mobula alfredi) via photographs and videos submitted by members of the public. More than 7000 sightings have been recorded, showing that manta rays can travel up to 1000 kilometres at a time. The data will inform conservation projects and reef management.
For Melanie Burford, the only New Zealander to win a Pulitzer Prize for photography, the camera is of secondary importance.
A saint in the making.
Naomi Arnold takes up timbersports—very briefly.
For palaeontologists, the dark diatomite layers of Foulden Maar are like the shelves of a great library. Outside that library, bulldozers wait.
Spearfishers are taking aim at freshwater pests instead of dwindling marine species.
What happens when you lose a limb?
Last October, Chris and Jorinde Rapsey and their two children set off from Cape Reinga to walk Te Araroa, the 3000-kilometre track that runs the length of New Zealand. They lived outdoors for five months and walked an average of 20 kilometres a day. For nine-year-old Elizabeth and six-year-old Johnny, it was an immersive education—a form of learning increasingly absent from the lives of young New Zealanders, even as international research affirms the importance of children spending time in nature.
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