Solutions to some of our most pressing problems have been waving at us from under the sea, all along.
Whales sing more when there’s oodles of food around, researchers have discovered. A team based at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute analysed whalesong picked up on hydrophones in the nutrient-rich seas off California. The first tapes were from 2015, when a marine heatwave was decimating the food web. That year, humpback whales sang on only about one-third of days, but as krill rebounded, followed by another humpback favourite, anchovies, singing picked up accordingly. After six years, the humpbacks were singing on 76 per cent of days. Blue whales and fin whales in the area followed similar patterns, singing more when the sea was brimming with krill. The researchers peeled away other possible variables, but the relationship between food and music stuck. As eating enough to fuel those massive bodies gets easier, the researchers suggest, there’s simply more time for singing.
The sable shearwaters of Lord Howe Island, between Australia and New Zealand in the Tasman Sea, are among the most plastic-contaminated seabirds in the world. Unsuspecting parents feed their chicks indigestible bits of plastic, mistaken for squid or fish. “It’s upsetting to see just how much plastic they’ve got, just as they’re starting life,” says Alix de Jersey from the University of Tasmania. In a study she led, one chick had consumed 403 fragments (pictured here) together weighing about the same as a slice of white bread. Some malnourished birds die. But researchers wondered whether even seemingly healthy chicks could be burdened with hidden health problems. The team ran blood tests on chicks that appeared in good nick, both with and without plastic in their stomach, looking for 745 different marker proteins. “If you feel like something is wrong, you go down to the GP for a blood test,” says de Jersey. “This is similar: a tool to see what might be going wrong.” A lot was wrong, it turned out. Stomach proteins were leaking into the bloodstream—sharp plastic can dig holes in the stomach wall, and cause a build-up of scar tissue dubbed “plasticosis”. The filtering organs—liver and kidneys—were failing, perhaps due to microplastics. And most surprising, signals usually associated with brain diseases such as dementia cropped up. This could inhibit the birds’ song-recognition ability and breeding success, de Jersey says, and future research will watch for manifestations of this cognitive decline in the colony. Sable shearwaters breed in New Zealand, too, foraging in plastic-loaded waters alongside our many other seabirds, such as Cook’s petrels and mottled petrels.
What sorts of birds are you likely to see if you tackle Te Araroa? After walking, as they say, “every f***ing inch” of the famous trail’s 3200 kilometres, methodically counting birds all the way, conservationist Colin Miskelly can tell you that mostly, there will be sparrows. The chirpy imports topped his tally at 12,500, more than double the second-most abundant, chaffinches. Other exotics were plentiful along the trail, too: blackbirds, mynahs, starlings and goldfinches all flocked into the top 10. Miskelly, curator of vertebrates at Te Papa, tackled Te Araroa with his brother the summer before last. Along the way he’d left stashes of counting paraphernalia: pencils, waterproof notebooks, and A3 graph paper. He posted his notes home as he went. All up, he worked out, it was about 24 square metres of paper, “enough to wallpaper a small room”. His GPS-enabled watch buzzed as each kilometre ticked past and at every second buzz, Miskelly jotted down the species he’d seen. After each day’s walk he would stay up late, feeding the data into citizen science project the New Zealand Bird Atlas (see ‘The Great Bird Nerds’, Issue 179), and knocking it into blog posts for Te Papa, and eventually, a paper for the journal Notornis. He’d be up early in the mornings, too, keeping an ear out for ruru, and diligently noting them down. Physically, after a lifetime of tramping, he found the trail “a doddle”. But when he reached the South Island forests he was dismayed by the quiet. It had been 30 or 40 years since he’d walked some of these trails. He especially missed the kākāriki. “It’s just part of that insidious ongoing decline that you don’t really notice year on year,” he says. “But after a gap of several decades, you just realise, ‘Oh, shit, things are going backwards here.” Sometimes, he knew, even birds that seemed to be thriving were in trouble. He saw plenty of tarāpunga, or red-billed gulls, for example—they came in third on his list—because the trail passed by the country’s mainland colonies. But Miskelly points out that two massive colonies offshore have collapsed due to lack of food. (The Kaikōura gulls are in trouble, too—see Issue 187.) Did he get sick of sparrows? Only on one day, he says—trudging through 10 kilometres of light industrial land in South Auckland. “It was more than 1000 sparrows in a day.” He went into the project determined to keep his blog positive, but his post for that section uses the phrase “ornithological tedium”. Miskelly’s now midway through a new mission: continuing the bird count on every track and old forestry route in the Tararua Forest Park. All up it’s about 600 or 700 kilometres, he reckons, and he’s walking it one long weekend at a time. “It’ll keep me out of the house for a bit longer,” he says.
Remember the sky on New Year’s Day of 2020? Across the South Island the air was thick and hazy, the sky an eerie yellow. Satellite images showed a brown cloud of smoke from massive Australian bushfires stretching all the way across the Tasman. When it reached the North Island, clouds over Auckland turned an apocalyptic orange. About the same time, caramel-coloured dust appeared on Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers and blanketed the snow cap on the Southern Alps. This was caused by the bushfires, too, the media reported. Or was it? Photography showed the dust coating the alps weeks before the late-December bushfires. New Zealand researchers analysed dust samples and found it actually came from the Australian desert, not the fires, and was carried across the sea on extraordinarily high winds. This phenomenon is rare, but not unprecedented: desert dust has coated the alps nine times since 1902. It’s not just an aesthetic change. Dust absorbs more sunlight than ice because it’s darker in colour, so it causes snow and glaciers to melt more quickly.
Unity. Discipline. Endless bobby pins. A story about what draws women to marching—and why they stay.
How Tara Viggo fled fast fashion and cut herself a new career.
We thought the giant wētā of the south were doing okay. Now, they are under siege.
For decades, young women of New Zealand marked their late teens with ceremonies that looked a lot like weddings.
Researchers have long suspected that pigs and other pests were eating our exquisitely rare native frogs. Now, we know for sure—and the scoffing is on an incredible scale.
Ten years ago, 22 pīwauwau, or rock wrens, went missing following a 1080 operation in the Southern Alps. For conservationists, it was a worry. The poison was certainly controlling rats and stoats, which had been preying on the pint-sized birds—but were the wrens taking the bait, too? In the summer of 2019, in Kahurangi National Park, 15 pioneering pīwauwau were strapped up with radio-tag backpacks weighing half a jellybean, and given colourful identifying ankle bracelets. Mountain slopes were scattered with 1080. Department of Conservation researchers then kept tabs on the wrens for eight days. All the birds remained safe during this risky period when snacking on the bait would have killed them. Then, nine days of heavy rain washed away the 1080. When the weather cleared, researchers couldn’t find one of the wrens—the battery in his backpack had puttered out. A second had been snaffled by a falcon, leaving behind the tag and a tattered feather-fluff. Another bird had died on her nest. Her wee body was sent to Manaaki Whenua—Landcare Research and tested for the presence of 1080. None was detected. In a recent paper, the researchers conclude that 1080 probably hadn’t infiltrated the wrens’ food chain. Those vanished wrens from 2014 had likely succumbed, instead, to an unseasonable snowstorm.
In 2024, Naomi Arnold slogged her way up Te Araroa, walking from Bluff to Cape Reinga over about nine months. Here, 100 kilometres into her odyssey and deeply unsure about her capacity to finish it, she tackles Southland’s notoriously boggy Longwood Range.
Orchids are everywhere. New Zealand has well over 100 species; worldwide there are tens of thousands. “The only places where you don’t see orchids are in the Earth’s deserts and Antarctica,” says Carlos Lehnebach, an orchid botanist at Te Papa. Also, we’re obsessed with them. “There are a lot of people who are nutty about orchids,” says Lehnebach’s colleague, evolutionary biologist Lara Shepherd. We love their vast range of flower colours and shapes, their collectability, and their bizarre pollination strategies (a whiff of carrion, anyone?) Yet orchids can still surprise us. In December 2020, when Shepherd sent Lehnebach a photo of a common leek orchid she’d found in Taranaki, he thought, “Woah, that’s a weirdo orchid.” Closer inspection—and Shepherd’s DNA analysis of a tiny chunk of leaf—revealed it was an entirely different species. “The sepals and petals are longer and more elegant, and it’s a slender plant,” he says. “The common leek orchid is a little bit chunkier, stockier, and the petals are shorter.” To fully describe the species, the scientists combed through dried herbarium specimens, century-old accounts from naturalists, and the intricate drawings of Bruce Irwin, a botanical illustrator and orchid lover who died in 2012. (His sketch at right was originally made in pencil; we’ve colourised it.) The diversity of the native leek orchids hadn’t escaped Irwin; he described this one as “slender and elegant”. In a nod to him, Lehnebach and Shepherd named their new weirdo Prasophyllum elegantissimum, or the extremely elegant leek orchid. Does that make the common leek orchid graceless, next to its supermodel cousin? Lehnebach is loath to fat-shame any organism, he says. “It does make you think about why thin is associated with elegance.” The new species is widespread—it’s been found from the Central North Island to Otago—but also rare, making up a tiny percentage of leek orchid specimens and iNaturalist records. “It has a preference for wetlands,” says Shepherd, “and New Zealand wetlands are so screwed up.” More discoveries are coming. The pair are working through a list of 20 more potentially new native orchid species. But it’ll take years. “There aren’t enough botanists in the country, and it takes a lot of effort to formally describe a species,” says Lehnebach.
My inbox is a world of hurt. Eels dead on beaches. Seabirds starving. Ice, melting faster than we thought. There are microplastics in our brains, my emails advise me, and in the breath of dolphins. This morning, an ordinary, terrifying line in a press release: “The climate crisis is a threat to civilisation.” No time to think about it, not really. Back to trying to write a coverline that’s cool and intriguing but also true. Now the phone’s ringing; a writer with field-work plans gone awry… I’ve found that it helps to have a sense of mission. To understand your “why”. For me, it’s the hope that documenting our world might help save it; even on the most stressful days, this idea feels like a flying-fox zipping us over the trees. I see a similar, singular focus in the seaweed scientists and entrepreneurs Kate Evans and Richard Robinson meet in their cover story on page 78. “For me personally, seaweed provides a sense of hope,” says Coromandel CEO Lucas Evans, who, because of that hope, slid down a rabbit hole of seaweed science eight years ago and is now permanently ensconced. I think about the moment the tight-knit team of Plant & Food Research scientists confirmed that their seaweed spray can help defend some of our most important crops from diseases. I even find myself identifying with the tech-bro of the piece, entrepreneur Steve Meller, who could have settled for a “nice little 20- or 30-million-dollar business” selling methane-busting seaweed supplements to farmers, but is aiming higher—as in, he wants to help save the world. Move fast and fix things, is the vibe. Maybe miracles can happen, if we work hard enough—and don’t get distracted. I got a great gust of that energy, too, from Coromandel conservationist Sara Smerdon. She talks fast and hard; replies to emails within moments. We’ve been hammering out the finer points of how pigs and other pests go about scoffing native frogs in the ecologically rich forest to which Smerdon is devoted (see Naomi Arnold and Rob Suisted’s story on page 36). Every call, I had a notepad to hand just in case, and it ended up covered in shorthand. Smerdon talked about the incredible critters that live in this spot. How she felt when she found pig sign all through rooted-up frog habitat—and then saw the same devastation again, and again. How she and others pushed for the evidence that might prompt action. And how hard it is, always but especially now, to get money to fight for our forests. “These frogs have so little protection anyway,” she told me. “This is why we do what we do.” Last summer, we asked readers for feedback on this magazine. We’ve printed out all the responses and sometimes, when the to-do list gets on top of me, I pull out the stack and read through it all again. “Continue to explain the why,” you told us. Someone else: “It is great to see passion in the writing and photography.” Others: “I want to hear the awesome stories of people doing good and interesting work in these dark times.” “Be brave. Stand up for science and scientists.” “Follow your gut always.” One person told us they wept over our feature about red-billed seagulls (Issue 187). “However, I accept that we need to know about these things and I don’t want you to stop covering them.” Often, the stories we tell in New Zealand Geographic are bleak. But in every story, we strive to show you that there are people like Sara and Lucas and Steve—clever, ambitious, stubborn people—who are getting stuck in because they care just as much as you do. We hope it might help you hold on to your why.
All around us, creatures are quietly getting on with secreting—oozing not just milk and tears, but beautiful homes, musical instruments and shark-fighting devices.
These days, it’s rare to spot a southern elephant seal in New Zealand. These hefty mammals—the males can reach five metres and 3.7 tonnes—are now resident only on remote subantarctic islands. But 800 years ago, these giants called Aotearoa home. Arriving on New Zealand shores, Polynesian voyagers would have encountered coastlines crowded with fur seals, sea lions, penguins—and southern elephant seals, says Nic Rawlence, who co-led research recently published in Global Change Biology. The scientists pieced together this prehistoric picture by examining specimens dating back thousands of years. Initially, they thought elephant seals were rare here—their bones were scarce. Most elephant seal bone is like “a thick piece of kitchen sponge with a really thin crust”, says Rawlence, a palaeogeneticist from the University of Otago. “So a lot of it breaks up. It just doesn’t preserve.” But once they began analysing unidentified fragments, elephant seal DNA surfaced in abundance, from sites spanning the far north to the deep south of mainland New Zealand. Using this DNA, the team reconstructed elephant seal whakapapa—an evolutionary tree tracing how populations have changed over time. The work revealed that the giants’ stay here was likely driven by the freeze-thaw rhythms of the last Ice Age. Elephant seals need ice-free beaches to breed, so at the height of glacial periods, the giants moved north to South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Then, as the ice around Antarctica melted, they recolonised subantarctic islands. Most of those that lingered further north were quickly hunted out. Not long after Polynesians arrived, the blubbery behemoths disappeared from mainland New Zealand, leaving an elephant-sized hole in the ecosystem. As a slow-breeding species, they could not handle hunting pressure. Could the elephant seal return one day to Aotearoa, or maybe ice-free parts of Antarctica? “That’s a big if,” says Rawlence. The species may no longer have the critical mass needed to make such a shift—food sources at their closest stronghold, Macquarie Island, are declining due to changes in climate. To Rawlence, the elephant seal is a colossal canary in the Southern Ocean: “if apex predators aren’t doing well, the whole food chain is in trouble.”
For 10 years, Tatsiana Chypsanava has been documenting Tūhoe life in Te Urewera, with an intimacy and understanding that comes from feeling like family.
The photograph of patternmaker Tara Viggo on page 29 was taken by her late friend, UK photographer Caylee Hankins, in 2019. The pair had bonded over their love of surfing and obscure gigs, and spent a glorious 10 days surfing with a bunch of friends in Morocco. “We instantly hit it off,” says Viggo. “She was like a stick of dynamite. She did a lot. After we’d finished a shoot, she’d always be like, ‘Okay, what are we doing next, are we going out?’ She was nonstop and I couldn’t keep up with her.” Hankins died of cancer a year after the shoot, aged just 31.
Nelson writer Naomi Arnold has two features in this issue, and both involve moments of extremis. Arnold recounts her muddy, soul-destroying slog through Southland’s Longwood Forest, near the start of her Te Araroa odyssey last year. Nine months after the forest of mud, she reached Cape Reinga. By then she was a feral shell of a person, subsisting on canned chocolate mousse, peanut butter and beef jerky, a nutritional plan she asked us to advise others against. (Our story is an excerpt from her superb book Northbound, published by HarperCollins.) In March we sent Arnold back into the bush, to write about feral pigs and other pests gobbling native frogs. To get a handle on the problem, hunters rummage through the guts of freshly culled pigs, counting tiny froggy arms and feet. Here, Arnold captures the moment the smell of that particular exercise hit her.
Entries are now open for Photographer of the Year, New Zealand's largest and most prestigious photographic event.
Colour photography hit its stride in New Zealand just as debutante balls were fading from the scene, so almost all of the images in official archives, like this group of young ladies pictured in their deb-ball finery in 1937, are black and white. Debutantes routinely wore white dresses, but many added vibrant flourishes that are washed out in these pictures: bunches of violets or pink roses, bold floral appliqués, a swipe of lippy. The colour portrait we’ve used for our History column on page 112 is a vivid exception—taken on July 10, 1963, at Wellington’s Spencer Digby Studios, it was part of a collection gifted to Te Papa in 1975. Curators don’t know the full name of the woman pictured—the negative is inscribed simply “Miss R. McNeill”—and they would love to hear from anyone who recognises her.
OE McLeod with RM Briggs, CE Conway and O Ishizuka Geoscience Society of New Zealand, $75
Richard Young, the winner of the wildlife category at last year’s Photographer of the Year awards, took this shot of a lone iceberg in the Ross Sea on a Heritage Expeditions voyage to Antarctica. Once again, Heritage Expeditions is sponsoring the wildlife category at the awards and there’s a $16,500 voyage to the subantarctic Islands on offer for this year’s winner. Enter your best shots at staging.nzgeo.com/photo. Young’s Antarctic work will be exhibited in the Karanga Plaza on the Auckland waterfront as part of Auckland Photography Festival from May 23 – June 12.
Mark Adams and Sarah Farrar, Massey University Press, $80
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