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.
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. “When Mum first got to the Noises which was the late fifties, Dad used to make her row out and he’d put his rugby jersey on and plop over the side and pick crayfish up and dump them around her feet.” This personal account is the first of a New Zealand Geographic-produced web-series—made in association with Live Ocean and Pew Charitable Trusts—that examines the former abundance of the Hauraki Gulf through the memories of those who can still remember these Songs of the Sea.
When a kiwi probes soil with its long beak, it’s not only scenting for prey, it’s using an extra sense to detect the wriggling vibrations of a grub. Known as “remote touch”, this ability is due to a special organ on the tip of its bill. Some shorebirds, such as the royal spoonbill, also have these beak mechanoreceptors to help them locate their prey in mud. Emu and ostriches have similar remote-touch organs in their bills, although they don’t forage by probing, or have any other habits that rely on this sixth sense. These birds are part of the palaeognath family, which includes moa. Could their remote-touch sense be a remnant from a distant ancestor of both moa and kiwi? Scientists from South Africa traced the palaeognath family tree back to the extinct lithornithids—long-legged, beak-probing birds that evolved during the Cretaceous period, more than 66 million years ago. To figure out if these avian ancestors had the remote-touch sense, the researchers compared the skeletal structures of 353 living birds with and without bill-tip organs, looking for patterns that would allow them to decide whether a fossil had the organ. Remote-touch organs are embedded in bony pits in the beak, and analysis of fossil bones suggested that the ancient birds did have bony pits and the extra sense of wiggle detection. Moreover, the fossils had been found by lakebeds, suggesting the lithornithids had foraged in mud, too. The researchers speculate that the remote-touch sense may have evolved even earlier: in the sensitive snouts of dinosaurs.
Emerald green with a distinctive yellow smile: meet Naultinus flavirictus, the newest addition to New Zealand’s treasure trove of more than 100 endemic lizard species. Found in the Far North, this gecko has been recognised as a distinct species since at least the late 1990s. It was finally described and named in a January 2021 paper published in Zootaxa, based on three specimens held at Te Papa Tongarewa. Its name refers to the yellow markings at the corner of its mouth. With its small home range and the ever-present threat of invasive mammals, the newly minted N. flavirictus is classified as “at risk” of extinction. The study’s authors speculate that these geckos once occupied tall, subtropical rainforest—which has dwindled to 3.2 per cent of its former extent since human arrival. The Te Paki area of Northland is a biodiversity hotspot, home to an array of unique and rare species, including 17 plants, 30 land snails, several stick insects and one skink found nowhere else. N. flavirictus is the ninth gecko in the Naultinus genus to be formally described. Its other eight family members are scattered around the country.
Scientists have filmed multiple instances of octopuses punching fish in the Red Sea during so-called collaborative hunting expeditions. An octopus may join forces with several species of fish to increase its chances of nabbing a meal. Groupers patrol the water column, using gestures to signal where prey is hiding. Octopuses can reach into tight cracks with their tentacles. Other species, like goatfishes, may scour the seafloor and join in a pursuit. To untangle the dynamics of these complex inter-species interactions, researchers filmed several cooperative hunting bouts using underwater cameras. They filmed eight instances of octopus-on-fish violence, finding a number of possible reasons for the octopus picking a fight. For example, if a fish partner failed to pull its weight or took more than its fair share, they might receive a jab. A sneaky parasitic fish might be shooed away with a tentacle. Sometimes, the octopus punched fish out of the way in order to take the prey for itself. Collaborative hunting also occurs between reef fish and moray eels—but, eels don’t have arms.
How do you trace the travels of a humpback whale? You listen to its song. Whales learn songs from each other, so their vocal patterns are clues to who they’ve been hanging out with—and where. Every winter, humpback whales leave their Antarctic feeding grounds and swim 5000 kilometres north to the tropics to breed. Some swim up the east coast of Australia, while others pass through New Zealand waters. Rochelle Constantine and Victoria Warren from the University of Auckland analysed acoustic recordings of humpback whale song to figure out the likely destination of individuals passing by New Zealand. They compared local whale recordings—captured off Kaikōura, the Wairarapa, in Taranaki Bight and Cook Strait—to audio samples from both eastern Australia and New Caledonia. The New Zealand songs shared more similarities with recordings from New Caledonia than from Australia, suggesting a stronger connection with the breeding grounds around the French archipelago. Eavesdropping on the whales also taught researchers about their preferred migratory routes. On their way north, most whales followed the east coast of the South Island, hung a left through Cook Strait, then powered north.
Ornithologist Colin Miskelly was up before dawn, his face lit by the reflected glow of his laptop, entering data into a spreadsheet while his expedition boat lay at anchor in Doubtful Sound. At 5.35am, something soft—“like a feathered butterfly”—hit him in the chest. Miskelly grabbed it—and there, its heart beating against his hand, was a grey-backed storm petrel. You may not have heard of this New Zealand bird, and you probably haven’t seen one, either. That’s because they spend most of their lives at sea, and were thought to breed only in the country’s farthest outposts: the subantarctic and Chatham islands. None of New Zealand’s early naturalists recorded grey-backed storm petrels anywhere on the mainland. But one was collected in Preservation Inlet in 1889, and there have been occasional sightings in Fiordland over the past 50 years. Seabirds only really hang out near land when they’re breeding, says Miskelly, “because no bird has ever figured out how to incubate a floating egg”. So are they a mainland bird after all? Hoping to solve this mystery, Miskelly’s team had spent much of the November 2020 research trip looking for grey-backed storm petrels, shining the ship’s spotlight into the sky on dark nights to attract them onto the deck. They had caught five birds, and seen them at six different sites along a 120-kilometre stretch of Fiordland’s northern coastline—but this one had landed in Miskelly’s lap. And it had a bare brood patch. “That pretty much says this bird is caring for an egg or very young chick at this moment and therefore should be within a day or two’s flight of its nest or possibly even closer,” he says. In 2017, Miskelly—who is Te Papa’s vertebrates curator—had caught another storm petrel with a brood patch at Chalky Inlet at the far southern end of the fiords. Together, the signs point to the species “breeding throughout the length and breadth of Fiordland”, probably on steep cliffs that are inaccessible to rats and stoats (and researchers). To prove this, Miskelly would need to GPS-track the birds, but this would require tracking devices that are lighter and more powerful than existing ones. Or a storm-petrel feather could turn up in the nest lining of one of Fiordland’s alpine rock wrens—a method previously used to indicate the presence of kākāpō.
Plant sex is the ultimate form of a long-distance relationship, with animals co-opted into carrying out the act. The result: much of life on Earth depends on the habits of hungry insects, bats, reptiles and birds. But we don’t know exactly who’s doing what to whom, and when—and what might happen if they disappear.
Some female sharks and rays living in the deep ocean can store sperm inside their bodies for years at a time, until the moment is just right for conception. Adèle Dutilloy from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) examined the reproductive organs of 147 female sharks and rays from nine species. Inside three of those species—the longnose velvet dogfish, the leafscale gulper shark, and the smooth deep-sea skate—were microscopic tubes of sperm, hidden in a tiny gland that produces the egg case. Dutilloy suspects most deep-sea sharks and rays have this feature, but the tubes are tricky to find. But why hoard sperm? It’s possible that in the dark, lonely depths of the sea, males and females don’t run into each other very often, so keeping some sperm for later allows females to reproduce more regularly. The second hypothesis is more disturbing. “Basically, there are gangs of male sharks, and when they encounter a solitary female, it’s all quite aggressive,” says Dutilloy. “When you see a female that’s been recently mated, she’ll have bite marks on the top of her back or on her fins. Females actually have more flesh on their backs than males do, to help account for that.” Dutilloy and study co-author Matt Dunn think that long-term sperm storage means female sharks don’t mate as often, and suffer less physical injury. Understanding the sex lives of these creatures gives scientists more insight into their life cycles—which in turn may shed light on whether they’re under threat from New Zealand’s trawl fisheries. “We know very little about them,” says Dutilloy.
Kūmarahou is a shrub that bursts into yellow blossoms in September, and plays an important medicinal role in rongoā Māori. Unfortunately, the plant’s scientific name, Pomaderris kumeraho, contains a crude insult in te reo Māori: “kumeraho” translates as “wanker”. Botanist Allan Cunningham named the species in the late 1830s based on the field notes of his brother Richard Cunningham, who asked locals what they called the plant, and wrote down the name as he heard it—noting that Māori used its springtime flowering as a signal for planting “their Koomeras or sweet potatoes”. But the way he spelled it references other words in Māori: kume, meaning to pull or slide, and raho, meaning human genitalia. Te Ahu Rei from Ngāti Tama pointed this out to Department of Conservation botanist Shannel Courtney, and with Unitec botanist Peter de Lange, Courtney put in a proposal to the governing body for plant taxonomy to change the name to Pomaderris kumarahou—the name they believe the Cunninghams intended. Rude words aren’t unusual in botanical names. The word orchid derives from the Greek word for testicles, and plenty of plants are named for their phallus-like forms. One member of the pea family was named Clitoria ternatea after the suggestive shape of its flowers, while “coprosma” means “smells like poo”. Hūpiro, or Coprosma foetidissima, apparently had such a stench that the botanists who named it mentioned its smell twice, in both the genus and species name. A committee will vote on the kūmarahou name proposal in 2023, when the next International Botanical Congress meets in Rio de Janeiro. “What we’re trying to do is rectify an unfortunate misinterpretation or misspelling,” says de Lange, “rather than saying this is an offensive term. “In the annals of New Zealand botany it is unique—a case of a Ngāti Tama elder coming to us with a problem that they kind of thought was funny, but that they really would like fixed—and us going through the appropriate channels to try to fix it.”
Why did scientists name our iconic forest giants Agathis australis when the trees have been called kauri for hundreds of years? Most of New Zealand’s iconic species were given scientific names by botanists during the colonial era, and the names they chose reflect the priorities and attitudes of the time. Some species were named for people whom scientists wanted to impress or insult. (That trend continues today: in 2019, a newly discovered blind, burrowing amphibian was named Dermophis donaldtrumpi, in a nod to the United States president’s climate change denial.) There are scientific names using racial slurs, like many South African species names deriving from “kaffir”. There’s Maoriblatta novaeseelandiae, in which scientists labelled a stinky black cockroach a “Māori bug”. In a comment paper in the journal Communications Biology, biogeographers Len Gillman from AUT University and Shane Wright from the University of Auckland argue that taxonomic protocol should allow scientific names worldwide to be changed to get rid of irrelevant or offensive names, replacing them instead with long-held indigenous ones. For example, Agathis australis could become Agathis kauri. Wright, who is Māori, would like to see another endemic conifer, Prumnopitys taxifolia, renamed Prumnopitys mataī—the Māori name implying chiefly leadership. Meanwhile, botanist Peter de Lange, who reviewed the paper, foresees some problems with the proposal. Which Māori dialect would prevail? Would Moriori names get a look-in? Should tūī be incorporated into Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae, when before the 1930s most Māori called the birds koko? What about mānuka, which until the 1930s was used to describe kānuka? (Mānuka was called kahikātoa.) Gillman and Wright point out that the concept would only work in the small number of cases where there is one consistent indigenous name across the whole of a species’ range, or where groups can agree on a name to use. So far, the idea has seen both pushback and support from the international taxonomic community, which doesn’t surprise Gillman. “Before you get change, you have vigorous debate.”
New friends ARE more important than family traditions when it comes to finding food, according to new research on hihi/stitchbirds. Hihi behaviour makes them perfect for investigating how songbirds communicate information to each other. Young hihi stick with their parents for around two weeks after learning to fly. Then they join a social group of other young juveniles, where they hang out for about three months. (Exactly why hihi form these temporary youth clubs is unknown.) Researchers set up feeding stations near hihi nest boxes on Tiritiri Mātangi, a predator-free island sanctuary 30 kilometres north-east of central Auckland. The stations had a variety of openings through which the birds could find sugar water. Young hihi initially copied the behaviour of their parents, following their choices of feeding station and entry point. But once the hihi juveniles farewelled mum and dad and joined a group, they switched their habits to match the group—changing feeding stations or the opening they used. If one hihi swapped to a different group, its routine would change again to align with that of the new group. Adult hihi, who might fleetingly tag along with a youth group, did not alter their habits to fit in with the majority.
When rats are away, the reptiles will play. Twenty years after rats were eradicated from Kāpiti Island, a survey has revealed that native geckos and skinks are flourishing on the offshore wildlife haven. Two sampling missions conducted 20 years apart—in 2014-15 and in 1994-96—provide a striking comparison. In the island’s coastal grasslands, the abundance of northern grass skinks and brown skinks has doubled, while copper skink numbers have exploded—there are 28 times as many. Skinks were also found in new places: brown and grass skinks slinking in the kānuka forest, copper skinks atop the grassy ridges. A single specimen of the rare and cryptic ornate skink was recorded in the recent survey, too. Meanwhile, geckos had increased nearly four times compared to pre-eradication numbers. Most were brown-grey Raukawa geckos, while a lone forest gecko was recorded in the high forest. Two brightly coloured Wellington green geckos were spotted. Kāpiti’s reptiles don’t live a completely carefree life: the abundant weka on the island are voracious lizard-hunters. The omnipresent threat of a sharp weka beak forces the cold-blooded animals into low, dense vegetation for protection—which is where the survey team found most of the reptiles. The study provides strong evidence for the value of island eradications.
In search of nectar, a bumblebee must manoeuvre through an obstacle course of foliage—a surprising feat for a stubby insect. This flying skill is due in part to the bumblebee’s awareness of its own form. Researchers trained bumblebees large and small to walk through a tunnel to retrieve sugar water. Every so often, the researchers would place a wall in the tunnel with a gap of varying width. The bee would buzz side-to-side, assessing the size of the opening, then adjust its position so its fuzzy body could angle neatly through. On occasion, the bee’s wingspan was larger than the gap. In these cases, the bee would spin wing-on to clear the tight gap. By closely examining more than 400 flight paths down the tunnel, the researchers found that the extent of reorientation depended on the size of the gap relative to the individual’s wingspan. While smaller bees would flit through a mid-sized gap with no adjustment, bigger bees rotated to fit through, seemingly aware of their larger stature. This suggests that bumblebees have perception of their own size: an intriguing ability given the tiny size of the bee brain. Size awareness is just one component of bee flight. Previous research revealed that bees navigate by measuring how fast the environment whizzes past them—a finding that has inspired the design of autonomous robots and drones.
Over several years, Heidy Kikillus attached tiny GPS collars to cats and recorded their movements. Each cat wore the collar for a week, so Heidy and her colleagues could better understand feline behaviour. Like tiny tangles of wool, the squiggles on this page show where Marmite, Zeus, Smudgy Bum and 100 other cats ventured over seven days. Some cats are homebodies, rarely venturing beyond their own backyard. Others roam suburban streets and parks, travelling over half a kilometre from home. The most mobile cat lives in a rural area, which is not shown on the map, and travelled 2.25 kilometres from home.
A study of penguin poo suggests Otago’s declining hoiho population are struggling to find food in their hunting grounds off the South Island coast. University of Otago PhD student Melanie Young collected 313 hoiho faecal samples, from the Moeraki Boulders to the Catlins. Some were obtained directly from the bird—“As soon as you hold a penguin it’s basically pooing on you,” says study co-author Ludovic Dutoit, also at Otago—while other samples were gathered from around the penguins’ nests while they were out fishing at sea. The poo also revealed that what the penguins eat has changed significantly since the 1980s, the last time their diet was studied. University of Otago professor Yolanda van Heezik conducted that research for her own PhD, which required a more interventionist approach—“I’ve made a lot of penguins throw up,” she says. Back then, the bones found in penguin spew showed the birds ate a varied diet of squid and small fish, including red cod, blue cod, āhuru, and opalfish. The new study showed the hoiho diet is now dominated by blue cod, and that many of those other fish, once common, are now gone. “There wasn’t a single penguin that hadn’t been eating blue cod,” says Dutoit. (Similar observations were made in other recent studies where a video camera was taped to a penguin’s back.) Blue cod might be the “snapper of the south” for humans, a sought-after commercial eating fish, but it’s not ideal for penguins, says van Heezik. Penguin parents feed their chicks “a lovely hot porridge of partially digested fish”, she says, and muscular blue cod doesn’t break down as easily as other prey. “It’s like trying to feed a baby huge chunks of solid food.” Large, powerful blue cod also take more effort to catch and swallow. The findings are concerning, because they suggest hoiho don’t have many dietary options. This could be part of the explanation for the species’ rapid decline on the mainland. “We’ve had starvation events,” says van Heezik. “Last year, hundreds of chicks were brought into rehabilitation because they were too thin. Clearly there’s something going on that means there isn’t enough food.”
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?
Diseases can take a huge toll on wild animals and hasten rare species towards extinction. In New Zealand, scientists, vets and conservation volunteers are teaming up to try to beat the viruses, parasites and fungi threatening some of our rarest bird species.
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