A story that proves we can change the world, one manky strip of city at a time.
Joe Harrison photographs an extraordinary league team.
Why stick with being male or female your whole life when you could have a go at both?
Imagine a fly landing on a spinning balloon—the balloon will tilt ever-so-slightly, shifting the fly to the outermost curve. Humans have caused a similar tilt, scientists have discovered, by building dams and reservoirs all over Earth. Over the past two centuries, our dams have created almost 30,000 lakes and reservoirs across the planet, holding back 10,000 cubic kilometres of water. New Zealand alone has more than 400 large dams (as explored in our previous issue, these have had a profound effect on our eels and other native fish). New research, led by Natasha Valencic of Harvard University, shows dams have also impacted the position of the north pole. After 1838, as dams went up all over Europe and North America, the pole retreated about 20 centimetres towards Russia. Then, after 1954, as dam building ramped up in Africa and Asia, it reversed direction. In total, the pole has shifted about a metre over that time. The finding, says Valencic, shows the profound impact humans are having on the planet beyond the more widely understood shifts such as temperatures and sea levels. And these impacts can play off each other. Earlier research found damming water up in lakes decreases global mean sea level. But these large bodies of water also compress the Earth’s crust and exert a gravitational pull on nearby seas, actually causing sea level to rise in some places, most notably the Bay of Bengal—surrounded by some of the most densely crowded areas on Earth. With dam construction showing no sign of stopping, it’s crucial, says Valencic, “to keep track of this, and to make sure we understand the volume of these reservoirs, so we can understand what’s going on along these coastlines”.
A penguin colony in a small town on the east coast of the South Island is thriving due to the conservation efforts of Ōamaru Penguins (formerly Ōamaru Blue Penguin Colony).
Lots of spiders are very good at one or two things. Stalking, maybe. Setting traps. Biting. But Steatoda nobilis, the invasive spider now spreading in New Zealand, has an arsenal of tactics—including a neurotoxic venom that can make its bites debilitatingly painful. The bad news? Chances are it will be at your house soon.
Kaiya Elmes is working hard to protect and preserve the underwater world she treasures.
Together, Cameron Lacey and Marie Crowe are delivering a New Zealand-first therapy: psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms.
Every autumn, our family give away something like 60 kilograms of feijoas, bagging the fruit up as it drops and lugging it to the gate. But this year, on February 20, a single male Oriental fruit fly was found in a surveillance trap down the road. A well-rehearsed strategy kicked in. Overnight, regiments of biosecurity wheelie bins appeared on the streets. The neighbourhood was divided into “zones”, and in ours, homegrown fruit was not allowed to leave the property. The feijoas fell and fell, and then the apples were upon us too. For a week or so, I filled the freezer, then I gave up and just started dumping boxes of fruit. The controls were not lifted until April 10: seven weeks. I checked our pheromone traps every day. Growing up on an orchard, we were acutely aware, even us kids, of the risk of a pest turning up. At airports, Mum and Dad would grumble that our bags, our shoes, weren’t being checked thoroughly enough. In 1999, the painted apple moth popped up in West Auckland, and Dad berated the TV when “those bloody Aucklanders” complained about the aerial spraying. The government put $65 million into eradication and we considered it money well spent. Biosecurity was a necessity, not a nuisance. But at New Zealand Geographic, I have come to understand that biosecurity is a two-tiered operation. Up top are the pests and pathogens that threaten farms, orchards, and growers. The fruit flies. The painted apple moth. We spent $50 million without blinking to get on top of Psa-V, a bacterium that hits kiwifruit; that’s nothing compared to what we’ve dropped on Mycoplasma bovis, which sickens dairy cows—it’s taken more than eight years and $886 million and we’re almost in the clear. All of it money well spent. But there’s another set of invaders that we are so soft on, we might as well usher them in. Kauri dieback and myrtle rust, for example, both exotic fungal diseases that are now smashing through centuries-old taonga trees. The alga Caulerpa made itself known four years ago and now covers more than 1500 hectares of seabed, smothering everything that lives there. Many people are working desperately hard to hold the line but it’s nothing like the efficient, aggressive machine that goes to work when cows are at risk. This is largely because industry bodies have standing agreements with the government about how they’ll work together to see off certain threats; this makes for a much faster and more organised campaign. Crucially, industry can also help pick up the tab: about a third of the total, for M. bovis, and about half for Psa-V. The pōhutukawa, the kauri and the pāua have no such fund to draw on. So our biosecurity response, when it’s only nature at stake, tends to be reactionary and fragmented; we’re not ready, we don’t organise with due urgency, and most of all we don’t spend, not on the scale we need to. And so, naturally, the exotic interlopers are getting away on us. Despite the name, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) is not meant to be all about livestock and crops. It is legally mandated to protect our environment—the bush and the streams and the birds and everything else, the stuff that doesn’t have a dollar sign attached because it’s priceless, the stuff of life. But the priority on protecting commercial interests seems institutionally baked in. Last year, a conservationist fighting myrtle rust in the East Cape forests told me he was hoping the fungus would annihilate commercial feijoa crops, too, or the mānuka used for honey, because then the eradication effort might see some real money. What of Steatoda nobilis, the invasive spider on our cover? It will, MPI acknowledges, probably prey on endemic insects, spiders and lizards (many of which are already endangered because they’re eaten by so many other pests). But it won’t hassle cows, or layer hens, or kiwifruit. So the biosecurity response is one big shrug. On a global heatmap predicting this spider’s favoured habitat, New Zealand is lit up red and orange. Welcome home, S. nobilis. You’ll like it here.
By Shamubeel Eaqub, Chief Economist at Simplicity
Philip Garnock-Jones has spent more than a decade photographing our native flowers as they’ve never been shown before: in luscious, three-dimensional detail.
For decades, scientists have been collecting brittle stars, or Ophiuroidea, a relative of the starfish, and storing them in museums and universities. Now, DNA analysis from thousands of these ancient, prickly crawlers shows that family ties hold fast across vast oceans—meaning the global depths are much more interconnected than we thought. Brittle stars from New Zealand waters, for example, are related to those found as far away as the Indian Ocean and the North Atlantic. “You might think of the deep sea as remote and isolated,” said Tim O’Hara, senior curator of marine invertebrates at Museums Victoria Research Institute. “But for many animals on the seafloor, it’s actually a connected superhighway.” O’Hara, lead author on the Nature paper tracing this work, hopes the world-first findings are used to inform policy decisions about deep-sea mining and the climate crisis. “The deep sea is highly connected, but also incredibly fragile.”
In the northwest Pacific, a crushing 10 kilometres below the surface, a community of shellfish, worms and anemones is quietly thriving. Fuelled by methane and hydrogen sulphide seeping from the Earth’s crust, the creatures sprawl across thousands of kilometres in oceanic trenches—together, they are by far the deepest known complex ecosystem in the world. A team of Chinese scientists discovered the community last winter during a dive in a submersible. They spent five weeks exploring, making dozens of dives to take samples and photographs; their work has just been published in Nature. The team documented huge microbial mats; waving fields of foot-long tubeworms; clusters of chonky clams sprinkled with sea anemones; and herds of bone-white bristleworms the size of a baby’s hand. Pictured at top is a swathe of seabed dubbed “Wintersweet Valley”—rather than branches of fragrant flowers, these are tubeworms, extending haemoglobin-tipped tentacles into the current. The white “petals” are tiny snails.
For a fleeting spell each winter, ponds and dams across Central Otago freeze—and the chase for wild ice begins.
For decades, the extinct endemic bird known as the Hodgens’ Waterhen has flummoxed taxonomists—since the first fossils were found in 1955 the flightless species, which favoured swamps and grasslands, has bounced between six different genera. But mitochondrial DNA has now settled things: the bird is a gigantic crake, five times bigger than its closest living relative, the Australian crake. To the Latin-inclined the species shall henceforth be known as Porzana hodgenorum (its first name, marking the clade, was previously Tribonyx). The scientists suggest “New Zealand Giant Crake” as a snappy English moniker.
For over a century, we hammered hāpuku. We hit the huge fish so hard that in five decades of underwater exploring, filmmaker Andrew Penniket had encountered them only once. Oceans photographer Richard Robinson had not seen a hāpuku at all, and not for want of trying. Until this winter, when the two made a remarkable trip to Fiordland.
As sea ice melts in a warming climate, the Southern Ocean should be getting fresher. That’s what scientists expected to find when they analysed recent satellite data. Instead, they were astonished to find it’s actually getting saltier. It likely means the delicate structure of the ocean has been upset, and relatively dense, warm, and salty water, which is usually held down by a fresher layer on top, is now bursting to the surface—accelerating ice retreat around Antarctica. The researchers speculate that stronger westerly winds, a consequence of climate change, might be to blame. “We think this could be a regime shift,” says Alessandro Silvano from the University of Southampton, who led the research. “What the consequences are in the long term is an open question.”
The fossilised fin of an ichthyosaur has given up an ancient secret: it seems the massive marine predators were very, very quiet. In a recent Nature paper, a team led by Swedish scientists describe the delicate serrations on the trailing edge of the one-metre-long fin. Owls use a similar wing structure, the team note—and are famously silent swoopers. The fin of the ichthyosaur also had a flexible, fleshy tip, further cutting down on acoustic and hydrodynamic disturbance and allowing for “stealthy searches and pursuits”.
Felicity Jones and Mark Smith, Massey University Press, $85, October 9
Andrew Crowe, Penguin, $35, September 2
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