location: New Zealand

location: New Zealand

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Is ‘legal personhood’ a tool or a distraction for Māori relationships with nature?
- Over the past decade, several Māori iwi (tribes) in Aotearoa New Zealand have made history and fetched international recognition by gaining “legal personhood” status for natural features, including a forest (Te Urewera), a river (Te Awa Tupua), a mountain (Taranaki) and recently, whales and dolphins.
- The move has been mirrored by Indigenous groups and others around the world seeking to boost protections for critical landscapes and natural entities.
- Recognition of legal personhood is seen by some as a reconciliation tool, which can help to undo some of the harm caused by the colonial alienation from the natural world.
- Yet questions remain for Māori, and many other commentators, about the extent to which such a legal instrument can enact meaningful change within a capitalist system, and whether or not such efforts serve to distract from, or contribute to, deeper transformation.

Annual South Pacific fisheries meeting nets bottom trawling controversy
- The annual conference of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), an intergovernmental body, took place in Manta, Ecuador, between Jan. 29 and Feb. 2.
- SPRFMO, which manages fisheries across the vast international waters of the South Pacific Ocean, made key decisions on bottom trawling, labor rights, observation of squid-fishing vessels and transshipment at sea, a practice that can obscure the origin of illegally caught seafood.
- In what was perhaps the most controversial outcome of the meeting, delegates failed to adopt a proposal to complete the implementation of rules passed last year that would have limited bottom trawling of vulnerable marine ecosystems, such as coral communities.

Some hemp with your wine? Study shows better soil, potentially flavors from intercropping
- A new study tests whether hemp is an effective plant for intercropping between wine grapes to increase soil health and potentially add another cash crop to vineyards.
- Vintners planted hemp with other cover crops on a vineyard in New Zealand, and found that while hemp was a robust grower, it didn’t compete with grape vines for water, even in dry conditions.
- Surprisingly, the wine made from grapes grown near hemp had a delicious, complex flavor profile, but researchers say more tests are needed to see if hemp was the driving factor.
- The researchers plan to investigate further whether hemp is an effective plant for intercropping to improve vineyard soil health and carbon storage.

After historic storm in New Zealand, Māori leaders call for disaster relief and rights
- After Cyclone Gabrielle hit New Zealand and mostly impacted Indigenous Māori homes, Māori delegates attending the United Nation’s conference on Indigenous peoples say the government has left them out of recovery services and funding.
- The delegates hope their presence at the United Nations forum will increase pressure on the New Zealand government to include Māori people in disaster recovery plans, provide more support for Indigenous-led climate initiatives, and fully implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
- Māori knowledge, known as Mātauranga Māori, has been increasingly included in climate and conservation projects across the country as part of the ‘Vision Mātauranga’ framework, but it has also attracted fierce debate on its status within the scientific community.

Small island, big ocean: Niue makes its entire EEZ a marine park
- In April, Niue, a small island nation in the South Pacific Ocean, designated its entire exclusive economic zone — an area about the size of Vietnam — as a multiple-use marine park called Niue Nukutuluea.
- Forty percent of the park is a no-take marine protected area; a smaller slice is managed by local villages. And about 56% of the park is a general-use zone where commercial fishing and other activities, including possibly deep-sea mining, could take place.
- The country has developed an unusual mechanism to fund the park, and is gathering support to confront the perennial challenge of monitoring and compliance in technologically advanced ways.

New Zealand convicts company of illegal trawling in high seas restricted area
- In late August, a court in Aotearoa New Zealand convicted a subsidiary of one of the country’s major seafood companies of illegal trawling in a closed area in the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia.
- The judge fined the company NZ$59,000 (about $33,000) and the skipper NZ$12,000 (about $7,000), and seized the vessel.
- It’s the fourth case in the past five years where courts convicted New Zealand-flagged vessels of illegal trawling.
- The recent conviction comes amid an ongoing debate about trawling in New Zealand, with campaigners calling for a ban on bottom trawling on submarine mountains, and the industry disputing their arguments and resisting aspects of the proposed change.

‘The sea means everything’: Q&A with deep-sea mining opponent Debbie Ngarewa-Packer
- New Zealand parliamentarian and Māori activist Debbie Ngarewa-Packer has spent more than two decades serving in leadership roles, using her positions to advance social justice issues and to campaign for the protection of the marine environment.
- A key issue that Ngarewa-Packer is currently working on is a push to ban deep-sea mining in the global ocean, a proposed activity that would extract large amounts of minerals from the seabed.
- Ngarewa-Packer previously worked with other Māori activists, NGOs and community members to block consent for a deep-sea mining operation in her home district of South Taranaki on New Zealand’s North Island.
- In an interview with Mongabay, Ngarewa-Packer talks about why it’s critical to protect the deep sea from mining, what ancestral teachings say about protecting the ocean, and why she feels hopeful about the future.

Young Māori divers hunt invasive crown-of-thorns starfish to save coral reefs
- The island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands is experiencing an outbreak of crown-of-thorns-starfish (taramea, Acanthaster planci), which could jeopardize the survival of its surrounding coral reef.
- Local environmental organization Kōrero O Te `Ōrau has been tackling the outbreak since 2020 by training young Māori people in scuba diving and running regular expeditions to remove taramea from the reef and bury them inland.
- The work has contained the outbreak on two sides of the island by collecting over 3,700 crown-of-thorns starfish, ultimately mitigating its impact on reef health. However, ongoing efforts are required.
- The project is also upskilling young Cook Islanders in marine management theory and practice.

‘We have a full pharmacopoeia of plants’: Q&A with Māori researcher Nicola Macdonald
- Aotearoa New Zealand’s green-lipped mussel industry provides a relatively sustainable source of animal protein, but the plastic ropes used to catch mussel larvae are a source of marine plastic pollution.
- Researchers are using mātauranga (Māori traditional knowledge) and Western science to work out whether natural fiber ropes, made from native species traditionally used by Māori, could provide a suitable and biodegradable alternative.
- Mongabay spoke with Indigenous researcher Nicola Macdonald about the research process, the findings so far, and the team’s hopes for helping create a more sustainable aquaculture industry.

Indigenous knowledge ‘gives us a much richer picture’: Q&A with Māori researcher Ocean Mercier
- The Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, have extensive knowledge about oceans and marine environments, which has not always been valued or recognized.
- In recent decades, Māori researchers and knowledge holders have elevated the position of mātauranga (Māori traditional knowledge) about oceans in academic and community contexts.
- Ocean Mercier is an Indigenous researcher who works at the interface of mātauranga and Western science, on issues such as marine and freshwater conservation and management.
- She recently spoke with Mongabay about the benefits, challenges and “crunchy bits” of working across knowledge systems in this way.

New Zealand developer denies key role in giant palm oil project in Indonesia
- A decade ago, Indonesian officials earmarked an area of rainforest in Papua province to become the world’s largest oil palm plantation.
- The entire project was initially controlled by a mysterious company known as the Menara Group, but other investors soon entered the scene. Nearly half the project is now in the hands of a New Zealand property developer named Neville Mahon and his Indonesian partners, the well-connected Rumangkang family, corporate records show, although Mahon has denied major involvement.
- A new article by the New Zealand-based news site Newsroom, re-published here by Mongabay, homes in on Mahon’s role in the project, which if fully developed would release an amount of carbon equivalent to Belgium’s annual emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Life and new limbs: Creative thinking, 3D printers save injured wildlife
- Prosthetics for injured animals are becoming increasingly possible and accessible thanks to 3D printing. Historically, artificial devices for wildlife have been expensive and very time-consuming to produce. 3D printing is changing that calculus by making it easier to design and build better-fitting prosthetics.
- A team of dedicated caregivers with vision, creativity and persistence is often the common thread that is key to helping injured animals.
- While 3D printing of animal prosthetics allows for multiple iterations that helps improve the device so that the animal can function more normally, size and materials can limit their use.
- Today, the use of 3D printers to aid animals is expanding beyond prosthetics, with veterinary anesthesia masks for small primates and other experimental uses being tried.

Scientists discover three glow-in-the-dark sharks
- Researchers have discovered that three deep-sea shark species — the kitefin shark (Dalatias licha), the blackbelly lanternshark (Etmopterus lucifer), and the southern lanternshark (Etmopterus granulosus) — all have bioluminescent properties.
- The kitefin shark, which glows blue, is the largest known vertebrate to emit bioluminescence.
- Further research is needed to fully understand how and why these sharks emit light.

Captive breeding helps New Zealand’s threatened black stilts take flight
- The black stilt or kakī is a critically endangered wading bird with fewer than 200 individuals living in the wild.
- The main threat to the kakī is introduced predators, such as stoats, ferrets, rats and cats, but the birds are also vulnerable to flooding in their habitat.
- The Kakī Recovery Programme, run by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, runs a captive-breeding and reintroduction program, which has helped boost the wild kakī population by 30% over the past year.
- In August 2020, the program released 104 captive-bred individuals to help bolster wild populations.

Bubbles, lasers and robo-bees: The blossoming industry of artificial pollination
- Ninety percent of flowering plants require the help of animal pollinators to reproduce, including most of the food crops we eat.
- But massive declines in the populations of bees, the most efficient pollinators around, and the rising cost to farmers of renting them to pollinate their crops, has spurred the growth of the artificial pollination industry.
- The technologies being tested in this field include the delivery of pollen by drones and by laser-guided vehicles and even dispersal via soap bubbles.
- Proponents of artificial pollination say it can both fill the gap left by the declining number of natural pollinators and help in the conservation of these species; but others say there may not be a need for this technology if there was a greater focus on conservation.

Māori push for pandemic stimulus spend to save ancestral forest
- The Raukūmara Forest on New Zealand’s East Cape has been hammered by introduced pests in the past half-century, and experts predict ecological collapse within a decade without an immense scale-up of pest control efforts.
- On April 1 this year, the New Zealand government announced a fund for “shovel-ready” projects to provide much-needed jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Two Māori tribal groups with ancestral claims to the Raukūmaras are campaigning for $21 million from the fund to carry out intensive pest control in the forest over the next five years.

Newly described giant extinct penguin and parrot once lived in New Zealand
- Paleontologists have found fossils of two extinct giant birds in New Zealand: an enormous penguin that would have been nearly as tall as an average adult human, and the largest parrot ever known to have existed.
- The new species of extinct giant penguin, formally named Crossvallia waiparensis, was described from leg bones found at the Waipara Greensand fossil site in the North Canterbury region in 2018.
- The extinct parrot, Heracles inexpectatus, was likely double the size of the previously largest known parrot species, the kakapo. The fossils of the parrot were first recovered from near St. Bathans in Central Otago in 2008.

“Part of something bigger”: the social movement around New Zealand’s Predator-Free 2050 goal
- Trapping for invasive mammals that prey on New Zealand’s endemic, often flightless, native birds has been part of the country’s rural life for a long time.
- Through the national Predator-Free 2050 program, which aims to wipe out three particularly troublesome predators from the country by 2050, multiple projects are ramping up protective activities to rid areas of these predators and encourage people’s participation in enabling bird populations to recover.
- Apps and other technological developments have already made trapping easier and more efficient, allowed over 1,500 community trapping groups to record and share trap and bait station information with others, and record birdsong to monitor impacts of pest control efforts.
- Support for the Predator-Free 2050 goal isn’t universal, so involving indigenous Māori tribes, who now hunt the invasive predators instead of native birds, and other communities — through technologies and other means of engagement — will remain integral to the ambitious program’s success.

Predator-free by 2050? High-tech hopes for New Zealand’s big conservation dream
- To preserve New Zealand’s remaining native biodiversity, the country has begun an ambitious nationwide program to eliminate its most damaging non-native invasive predators — rats, stoats and possums — by 2050.
- To carry out this mammoth task, government and private entities across the country are applying new technologies to existing detection, exclusion, trapping, poisoning and other strategies used to reduce the numbers of harmful predators.
- The program has wide public support, though some effective technologies, particularly gene editing, are controversial; recognition of the importance of public support, as well as cost and effectiveness, help guide the program’s development.

How climate change could throw Māori culture off-balance
- Māori culture is at risk due to predicted changes in the ranges of two culturally important native plants, kuta and kūmarahou.
- Under projected climate change models, traditional weavers will face a shortage of kuta, a grass-like sedge used for weaving, in their ancestral harvesting sites.
- Kūmarahou, a shrub used for medicinal purposes, will become more abundant, devaluing the plant as a form of cultural currency in Māori tradition.

Creating a high-tech island to save one of the world’s rarest birds
- Scientists in New Zealand are combining tracking, genomics, and drone technologies to save the kākāpō, the giant flightless parrot nearly eradicated by invasive predators, such as dogs, rats, and cats brought by human settlers.
- Data loggers on a predator-free island read information emitted by transmitters worn by each of the birds and send the data to the research team; the information tells researchers where birds are nesting, when birds are sick, and when (and with whom) a given bird mated.
- The team supplements natural kākāpō breeding with artificial insemination, including flying a sperm-carrying drone that can swiftly move sperm from a male to an appropriate female across the island, which the researchers believe helps keep the sperm more viable when it reaches the female.
- For this, scientists “match” male and female kākāpō using genetic analysis to determine how closely related the two birds are and choose mates that are most distantly related. The research team is reviewing genomic data from all adult kākāpō for clues about fertility and disease.

How do you assess if a reintroduced species is thriving? Listen for it
- Researchers in New Zealand combined sound data from acoustic monitoring devices with species occupancy models to assess the success of translocating an endangered New Zealand bird, the hihi, to invasive species-free locations.
- The scientists say in their paper that advances in acoustic monitoring and statistical techniques have made it possible to infer spatial and temporal changes in population dynamics without needing to track individual animals.
- As wildlife managers increasingly release animals back to their historic ranges, cost-effective, non-invasive data collection, automated pattern recognition, and analysis techniques that predict the likelihood of species occupying a given location over time could improve the success of the reintroduction process.

Māori community reconnects youth with their ancestral forests
- Māori have urbanized rapidly over the last century, undergoing a general disconnection from the environment.
- To buck that trend, members of the Tūhoe tribe in the community of Ruatāhuna, New Zealand, have been teaching their young people about their traditional culture and forest knowledge.
- They’re changing the format of their local schools to reflect a Tūhoe worldview, and have set up a “forest academy” for teenagers.
- This is the third part of Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Ruatāhuna community’s effort to restore their ancestral forest.

What makes a forest healthy? Māori knowledge has some answers.
- Working with its elders and other traditional knowledge holders, the Māori community of Ruatāhuna, New Zealand, has articulated its own, culturally relevant system for monitoring the health of the ancient Te Urewera temperate rainforest it calls home.
- For instance, the community regards the size of flocks of kererū or wood pigeon (Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae) as a key indicator of forest health, and assesses it by the amount of awe an observer feels when witnessing a large flock at close range.
- The community feels a sense of urgency to document this kind of traditional knowledge before the elders who hold much of it pass on.
- This is the second part of Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Ruatāhuna community’s effort to restore its ancestral forest.

A Māori community leans on tradition to restore its forest
- Deep in New Zealand’s vast Te Urewera forest, which is famously endowed with a legal personality, the Māori community in Ruatāhuna is working to restore and sustain its forests and way of life.
- Having regained control of their land after decades of logging by outside interests, members of the Tūhoe community are trying to bring back conifers in the Podocarpaceae family, which they refer to as the chiefs of the family of Tāne, the god of forests and birds.
- Other initiatives include controlling invasive species, developing a community-based forest monitoring system centered on traditional values and knowledge, establishing a “forest academy” for local youth, and setting up a profitable honey enterprise to provide jobs and eventually fund forest restoration.
- This is the first part of Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Ruatāhuna community’s effort to restore its ancestral forest.

New Zealand penguins make ‘crazy’ 7,000-km round trip for food
- Until recently, researchers did not know where the Fiordland penguins of New Zealand, known locally as tawaki, went to hunt during their pre-moult summer period.
- A new study that tracked 17 penguins has found that the birds made a round trip of up to 6,800 kilometers (4,225 miles) in 2016, making it one of the longest-known pre-moult penguin migrations to date.
- The penguins went nearly halfway to Antarctica, traveling to the sub-tropical front south of Tasmania or to the sub-Antarctic front to hunt, the researchers found.
- It’s not clear why they went so far, given that other penguin species in New Zealand seem to find enough food in the waters near their breeding colonies. Researchers say more studies over several seasons and involving more individual penguins are needed.

Webs under water: The really bizarre lives of intertidal spiders
- Scientists have discovered a 15th species of intertidal spider, a family of unusual arachnids that live in coastal habitats that are submerged during high tides.
- The newest species, named after singer Bob Marley, was discovered living on brain coral off the Australian coast.
- Scientists know that some species create air pockets with their hairs, while others build waterproof webs, but little is known about most of these fascinating spiders.
- Intertidal spiders face a number of threats, including rising sea levels due to climate change, and pollution.

The world’s newest great ape, revealed a month ago, is already nearly extinct: IUCN
- This week, the world’s newest great ape Tapanuli orangutan was officially categorized as “Critically Endangered” by the IUCN as the species lost over 80 percent of its global population over generations due to habitat loss.
- The classification of the orangutan came in conjunction with the conservation union releasing its latest Red List of “Threatened” Species which added thousands of animal and plant species.
- The list is a mixed bag of good and bad news for conservation.

Meet the new giant sunfish that has evaded scientists for centuries
- Scientists have named the new species the Hoodwinker sunfish or Mola tecta (derived from the Latin word tectus meaning disguised or hidden).
- The team is yet to determine the Hoodwinker’s range, but they have found the fish around New Zealand, off Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales (Australia), South Africa and southern Chile.
- The Hoodwinker sunfish can grow up to 2.5 meters (over eight feet), the team estimates, and its slimmer, sleeker body doesn’t change much between juveniles and adults.

Underwater cameras let scientists dive beneath the surface with dolphins
- Using custom-made, noninvasive underwater cameras that they attached directly to the dolphins’ bodies, researchers with the University of Sydney and the University of Alaska Southeast captured more than 500 minutes of footage, allowing them to observe behaviors that humans rarely have the privilege of witnessing.
- The study’s lead author, Heidi Pearson, a dolphin specialist and assistant professor of marine biology at the University of Alaska Southeast, said that the cameras provide such a fine degree of information that they could open up whole new avenues of research for protecting endangered species.
- While the cameras themselves may represent the cutting-edge in technology, Pearson and team attached them to eight wild dusky dolphins off the coast of New Zealand with the aid of decidedly low-tech implements: a long pole and some Velcro pads.

Two new species of glowing spook fish discovered
- Barreleyes, with their large transparent heads, are one of the rarest and “most peculiar and unknown fish groups in the deep-sea pelagic realm”, researchers say.
- Some barreleyes have special organs on their bellies called “soles”, covered with pigmented scales, that reflect light emitted from luminous organs inside their bellies.
- By comparing the pigment patterns on the soles of barreleyes fish collected near American Samoa and New Zealand with long-preserved specimens previously caught near the mid-Atlantic ridge and Australia, researchers found that two species are new to science.

Baby boom for New Zealand’s extremely rare giant parrot
- Only 123 adult kakapos (Strigops habroptila) remain in New Zealand.
- This year, 37 kakapo chicks have survived so far, making it the most successful breeding season in more than 20 years of conservation efforts, researchers say.
- It will be six months until the chicks are added to the head-count of the total kakapo population, Conservation Minister Maggie Barry said in a statement.

Invasive species hop on tourists worldwide
- Foreign plants, animals, and even bacteria can devastate ecosystems where they don’t belong.
- New research finds that tourists introduce unwelcome species around the world.
- To keep wilderness pristine, personal awareness is the first step.

Population of Maui’s dolphins slips below 50

A New Zealand dolphin, one of whose two subspecies, the Maui’s dolphin, is critically endangered with a quickly diminishing population. Photo credit: Steve Dawson/NABU International Foundation for Nature. Maui’s dolphins (Cephalorhynchus hectori maui) are edging closer to extinction. Strikingly marked, with a dark, rounded dorsal fin that has been likened to a Mickey Mouse ear, […]
World on course to lose 1 in 6 species to climate change – South America, Australia, New Zealand face even more extinctions

Renowned biologist E.O Wilson, assessing Earth’s sixth great extinction now underway, described the future as a shrinking keyhole through which all species must pass as humanity responds to, and hopefully averts catastrophe. A new study published in the journal Science shows that this keyhole could drastically narrow with each degree increase in global temperature due […]
It only took 2,500 people to kill off the world’s biggest birds

All of the world’s moas exterminated by just a few thousand people A Haast’s eagle divebombing a pair of moas. A new study finds that it only took a few thousand people to kill off the nine species of moas found on New Zealand, an act which also led to the extinction of their only […]
How do we save the world’s vanishing old-growth forests?

Scientists say both rich and developing countries must recognize primary forests as a conservation priority. Primary rainforest in Imbak Canyon in the state of Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. The forest is home to pygmy elephants, clouded leopard, orangutans, banteng, and proboscis monkeys among thousands of other species. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. There’s nothing in the […]
Long lives, big impacts: human life expectancy linked to extinctions

Since the arrival of Homo sapiens, other species have been going extinct at an unprecedented rate. Most scientists now agree that extinction rates are between 100 and 1000 times greater than before humans existed. Working out what is driving these extinctions is fiendishly complicated, but a new study by scientists from the University of California, […]
Blame humans: new research proves people killed off New Zealand’s giant birds

Artist’s rendition of the coastal moa, which a new paper says was hunted to extinction, along with all of its relative, by humans. Image by: Michael B. H./Creative Commons 3.0. Moas were a diverse group of flightless birds that ruled over New Zealand up to the arrival of humans, the biggest of these mega-birds stood […]
Environmental groups: top secret Pacific trade agreement to sacrifice wildlife, environment

Environmental groups have blasted draft text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) released yesterday by WikiLeaks as potentially devastating to the environment and wildlife. The massive 12-nation free trade agreement has been negotiated in secret now for almost four years, and the information release by WikiLeaks shows that key environmental safeguards in the agreement are being […]
Plan to preserve the world’s ‘last ocean’ killed by Russia

As the most pristine marine ecosystem on the planet, Antarctica’s Ross Sea has become dubbed the world’s “last ocean.” Home to an abundance of penguins, whales, orcas, seals, and massive fish, the Ross Sea has so far largely avoided the degradation that has impacted much of the world’s other marine waters. However, a landmark proposal […]
Low carbon prices may spur deforestation

Low carbon prices may spur deforestation in New Zealand according to a survey by a researcher at Canterbury University. As reported last week by The New Zealand Herald, a collapse in carbon prices on the country’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) has undercut an incentive for farmers to preserve forests. Large forest owners — those who […]
Saviors or villains: controversy erupts as New Zealand plans to drop poison over Critically Endangered frog habitat

New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) is facing a backlash over plans to aerially drop a controversial poison, known as 1080, over the habitat of two endangered, prehistoric, and truly bizarre frog species, Archey’s and Hochsetter’s frogs, on Mount Moehau. Used in New Zealand to kill populations of invasive mammals, such as rats and the […]
Climate Summit in Doha characterized by lack of ambition

Coal-powered Castle Gate Power Plant in Ohio. Photo by: David Jolley. Ahead of the 18th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Doha, Qatar a variety of reports warned that the world was running out of time to avoid dangerous climate change, and that there was a widening gap between what nations have […]
Whale only known from bones washes up on beach in New Zealand
- In 2010, a whale mother and male calf were found dead on Opape Beach in New Zealand. Although clearly in the beaked whale family scientists thought the pair were relatively well-known Gray’s beaked whales.
- That is until DNA findings told a shocking story: the mother and calf were actually spade-toothed beaked whales, a species no one had ever seen before as anything more than a pile of bones.

Penguins face a slippery future

Adelie penguins hunting for food. Photo by: J. Weller. Click to enlarge. Pablo Garcia Borboroglu will be speaking at the Wildlife Conservation Network Expo in San Francisco on October 13th, 2012. Penguins have spent years fooling us. With their image seemingly every where we turn—entertaining us in animated films, awing us in documentaries, and winking […]
Forget-me-not: two new flowers discovered in New Zealand gravely endangered

The new species, Moore’s forget-me-not (Myosotis mooreana) is known from only a single location. Photo by: Lehnebach et al. New Zealand scientists have discovered two new species of forget-me-nots (flowers in the genus Myosotis), both of which are believed to be endangered. Discovered in Kahurangi National Park on the South Island, the new species highlight […]
Navy discovers 10,000-sq mile patch of floating rock in South Pacific (photos)

Pumice island. Courtesy of the Royal Navy 0810pumicefloating New Zealand’s Royal Navy has found a 10,000-square mile (26,000-square kilometer) patch of pumice floating on the surface of the South Pacific Ocean, reports the agency. The zone of floating rock was first sighted early this week by a Royal New Zealand Air Force plane. A subsequent […]
Maui’s dolphins still in danger of extinction despite New Zealand’s protective measures

Hector’s dolphin, the parent species of the Maui’s dolphin. Photo by: James Shook. The New Zealand government’s recent efforts to protect the world’s smallest dolphin have come under scrutiny from various conservation organizations at the 64th meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). There are only 55 Maui dolphins (Cephalorhynchus hectori maui) now found on […]
New species threatened by mining dubbed the ‘Avatar moth’

A new species of moth has been named after one of the world’s most popular movie blockbusters: Avatar. Discovered on New Zealand’s Denniston Plateau during a biodiversity survey by local NGO Forest & Bird this March, the new moth species is imperiled by plans for a coal mine on the plateau. The name—Avatar moth (Arctesthes […]
World’s smallest dolphin: only 55 left, but continue to drown in nets

Hector’s dolphin is the parent species of the subspecies Maui’s dolphin. Both are only found in New Zealand. Photo by: Bigstock. The world’s smallest dolphin is also the closest to extinction. New Zealand government figures show that Maui’s dolphin (Cephalorhynchus hectori maui) are down to just 55 mature individuals, falling from 111 in 2005. The […]
Paleontologists reconstruct extinct, “elegant” penguin

Two Kairuku penguins come ashore, passing a stranded Waipatia dolphin. Artwork by Chris Gaskin, owner and copyright owner: Geology Museum, University of Otago.. Around 25 million years ago a penguin with a long, sharp beak and massive flippers lived in a New Zealand that was almost entirely underwater. The bird, named Kairuku after a Maori […]
Greenpeace NZ: APP misrepresented test results

Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) misled the public when the paper products giant claimed a paper testing company had found its fiber clear of rainforest fiber, says Greenpeace. Last week Asia Pulp & Paper issued a press release claiming that Greenpeace New Zealand’s campaign against Cottonsoft, a New Zealand toilet paper brand, had “no scientific […]
800 nearly-extinct giant snails freeze to death in conservation center

New Zealand’s Powelliphanta snail. Photo by: Alan Liefting. Eight hundred large carnivorous snails, known as Powelliphanta snails (Powelliphanta augusta), died in a Department of Conservation (DOC) fridge in New Zealand over the weekend. A faulty temperature gauge caused the fridge to cool down to zero degrees Celsius, slowly killing all the molluscs but a lone […]
New Zealand’s log exports to China surging
New Zealand’s log exports to China are surging, reports the Wood Resource Quarterly. Log exports from New Zealand in 2011 are running 25 percent of last year’s rate and are expected to hit a record. Total log exports may reach 13 million cubic meters, which would represent a doubling over 2008. One third of New […]
Photos: New Zealand oil disaster kills over 1200 birds to date

White capped albatross killed by oil. This species is listed as Near Threatened by the IUCN Red List. Photo ©: Forest & Bird. According to the New Zealand government an oil spill from a grounded container ship in the Bay of Plenty has killed 1,250 seabirds with hundreds of others in rescue centers. However, conservationists […]
Bird-killing oil spill New Zealand’s ‘worst environmental disaster’

View Larger Map A marks the location of Papamoa Beach in the Bay of Plenty. An oil spill from a grounded container ship in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty is threatening to worsen as authorities fear the ship is breaking up. Already, 350 tons of oil from the ship, the MV Rena, has leaked out […]
Supermarket challenges toilet paper marker to disprove deforestation allegations

A major New Zealand supermarket chain has asked Cottonsoft to prove its environmental credentials after testing by WWF and Greenpeace revealed the toilet paper maker was using mixed tropical hardwoods sourced from Indonesia’s rainforests in its tissue. reports The Dominion Post. On Wednesday Foodstuffs demanded that Cottonsoft undertake an independent audit of its environmental impact. […]
Taking corporate sustainability seriously means changing business culture

Clare Raybould at the Auckland Zoo where she volunteers. Photo courtesy of Clare Raybould. As more and more people demand companies to become sustainable and environmentally conscious, many corporations are at a loss of how to begin making the changes necessary. If they attempt to make changes—but fall short or focus poorly—they risk their actions […]
Goodbye national parks: when ‘eternal’ protected areas come under attack

Outline of Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first modern protected are, as seen by Google Earth. Yellowstone was opposed by many when it was first created including logging and mining industries. One of the major tenets behind the creation of a national park, or other protected area, is that it will not fade, but remain […]

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