+ LOG IN
My Account
Facebook-f Twitter Instagram Envelope Search

A whole year of tourists giving glow-worms little frights

Timelapse photography shows the tiny superstars of the world’s most famous glow-worm cave system, Waitomo,...

Fur seals on the rocks

In our cover story last issue, we outlined the many threats facing our fur seal...

On tree bark, a vast new army of climate allies

Up to six trillion climate change-fighting microbes inhabit each square metre of tree bark, according...

“Bup, squeek, brumm, drr”

Anyone who’s camped in pūkeko country knows they make a heck of a lot of...

A delicious crayfish circle of life

“A dead fish is a dead fish.” That’s the key finding of a recent study...

Before the flood

Waiapu River, a treasure of Ngāti Porou, is now known, too, for its volatility. After...

Every breath you take

Oxygen shaped the world as we know it. It’s why we hiccup and why frogs...

Want native birds? This fuchsia is by far your best bet

Scientists who spent nine years birdwatching in Wellington ecosanctuary Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne report...

A single tiny bone suggests bowerbirds once lived in Aotearoa

The bone belonged to a songbird, but it didn’t belong to any existing New Zealand...

A melting pot of mozzies

In 2019, scientists asked the public to catch and freeze mosquitoes, then post them to...

How to renovate the trashed seafloor? Start with fake horse mussels

Horse mussels are massive. Given a chance, the shellfish can grow to almost half a...

The weight of what we’ve lost

Since the 1850s, two per cent of marine mammal species have gone extinct. But if...

Two years

On the road before the clean running of an EV makes up for the emissions...

The spiderweb that caught a sheep

For years, scientists have been using water samples to trace plants, microbes, animals and fungi...

How did the dairy cow get its spots?

Most dairy cows in New Zealand are Friesians—the ones with black spots dappling white backs...

Huge news for sponge lovers

Almost all sponges live in the sea, “and they’re the kind that people know about”,...

Moss tapestry

A new assessment of Aotearoa’s mosses shows about a third of our 560-odd species are...

Heatwaves threaten a plankton that produces one-tenth of the oxygen on Earth

Of all the lifeforms that photosynthesise—turning light into energy, and pumping out oxygen—Prochlorococcus is the...

They’re making sunscreen out of pollen now—and it works

Pollen can survive millions of years in certain conditions. That’s because each tiny grain is...

Pushing our luck

While most of the world’s new settlements are slowly shifting inland, in New Zealand we’re...

Virus on the wing

A year ago, we reported on preparations for the arrival of the highly pathogenic avian...

Our lit-up nights have birds singing overtime

Across the world, light pollution such as streetlights, signage and lit-up windows is prompting hundreds...

Hector’s dolphins are crazy, topsy-turvy hunting machines.

What do our smallest dolphins get up to underwater? Until now, researchers have been limited...

Written in the stars

For decades, scientists have been collecting brittle stars, or Ophiuroidea, a relative of the starfish,...

Stealth attack

The fossilised fin of an ichthyosaur has given up an ancient secret: it seems the...

The sea around Antarctica is much saltier than it should be—and that’s a bad thing

As sea ice melts in a warming climate, the Southern Ocean should be getting fresher....

Bird puzzle: solved

For decades, the extinct endemic bird known as the Hodgens’ Waterhen has flummoxed taxonomists—since the...

Life, deeper than we ever imagined

In the northwest Pacific, a crushing 10 kilometres below the surface, a community of shellfish,...

Humans are tipping the planet off its axis

Imagine a fly landing on a spinning balloon—the balloon will tilt ever-so-slightly, shifting the fly...

Space turbulence

What you’re looking at is a slice of the roiling, chaotic stuff between stars—the magnetised...

3 FREE ARTICLES LEFT

Subscribe for $1  | 

3 FREE ARTICLES LEFT THIS MONTH

Keep reading for just $1

$1 trial for two weeks, thereafter $8.50 every two months, cancel any time

Already a subscriber?

Signed in as . Sign out