Put a drone up and any self-respecting black-backed gull in the vicinity will be there within moments, pecking and hollering and generally bullying the strange, buzzing interloper. “Black-backs are always the hardest,” says oceans photographer Richard Robinson—he’s been 12 miles off the coast, he says, with no birds in sight, but as soon as the […]...
While editing Sarah Newey and Simon Townsley’s feature story about the surge of methamphetamine and HIV in Fiji (page 50), I read a Rapid Assessment report from a team commissioned by the United Nations. They spent weeks in Suva in 2025, interviewing dozens of men and women who inject meth. In their own words, these […]...
Kelsey Waghorn, HarperCollins...
In the studio with textile artist Rowan Panther...
Timelapse photography shows the tiny superstars of the world’s most famous glow-worm cave system, Waitomo, flickering in response to us pesky humans. Noise makes the glow-worms dial up their bioluminescence, and artificial light prompts them to dim, or switch off for a while. This heat map tracks the intensity of the light show across the […]...
In our cover story last issue, we outlined the many threats facing our fur seal colonies. While most populations are stable or growing—for now—a new paper shows that all along the West Coast, birth rates are plummeting. At Wekakura Point, Cape Foulwind, and Taumaka Island, pup numbers have dropped by 83 per cent, 71 per […]...
Up to six trillion climate change-fighting microbes inhabit each square metre of tree bark, according to a new study by scientists at Australia’s Monash and Southern Cross universities. The paper, published in Science, samples eight species of Australian tree and finds that not only is the bark teeming with life, but those microbes are “air […]...
Anyone who’s camped in pūkeko country knows they make a heck of a lot of noise. Now, researchers led by a team from the University of Konstanz in Germany have discovered that the birds’ language also has a “sophisticated and structured” logic to it. The team analysed thousands of recordings of the birds’ raucous breeding […]...
“A dead fish is a dead fish.” That’s the key finding of a recent study on the scavenging habits of our native crayfish, led by Calum MacNeil, a freshwater and invasion ecologist at Cawthron Institute. Kōura detect predators, such as eels, in the water through chemical cues. They can also tell when a predator is […]...
Waiapu River, a treasure of Ngāti Porou, is now known, too, for its volatility. After decades of forestry thrashing the land, every major storm pushes silt and pine slash downriver to the people and beaches of Tairāwhiti. This image, showing where the river meets the coast at Gisborne, is based on aerial LiDAR data collected […]...
