Sea Lion pup (Auckland Islands) Photo: Bill Morris

The recent instance of a New Zealand sea lion being shot on the Otago Peninsula highlights the ignorance surrounding the sea lions that occur along our coast. The person who fired the .22 bullet that festered inside this animal for days or weeks before killing it may never be caught – if they are, they could face up to six months jail and fines of up to 250,000. Those who are aware of the precarious situation these sea lions face would probably argue a distinctly more medieval form of punishment might better suit the crime.

Anyone who’s spent a bit of time exploring the beaches around Dunedin will have encountered sea lions. They are one of the most interesting and exciting forms of wildlife in our region, yet many people know very little about them. A lot of people don’t realize that these animals once bred in great numbers around our coasts; that the breeding colonies in the sub-Antarctic Islands are the probably the fringe remnants of the original New Zealand sea lion population and that the species is in peril of extinction.

Research has shown that the sea lions around Otago spend significantly less time foraging for food and travel far shorter distances than their counterparts in the Auckland Islands. This may be because the coasts of Otago are central to their historical natural habitat. Their lives are easier here and that is why they are, slowly, returning to breed on the Otago Peninsula.

However, the last few years have seen a number of instances of sea lions in the region being harassed, beaten and attacked by dogs. People seem incapable of leaving space for wildlife and a few actively seek to trouble, injure or even kill them.

Students from the Centre for Science Communication regularly film sea lions as part of their studies and a few have made them the subject of their final film projects. One of my favourites from recent years is Kat Baulu and Alistair Jamieson’s Whetu Rere – The Sea Lion and the Comet. 

A few weeks ago my girlfriend filmed a young female sea lion scratching its back on a park bench at Aramoana. By identifying the tag number we found out that the animal’s name is Carleigh, that she was born in January 2011 and that her mother is called Teyah (Thanks Katie Wise). A visit to the New Zealand Sea Lion Trust’s website shows Carleigh’s family tree – it highlights just how small the Otago population is and therefore how vulnerable. We need to do everything we can to make a space for them here alongside our city.

By Bill Morris

In the mornings I often ride my bike along the 13 kilometre stretch of road from Port Chalmers into Dunedin city. Once I’ve survived the onslaught of massive logging trucks and buses along that road I’m able to duck off onto the cycle lane, a peaceful section that takes me alongside the railway track and the harbour, past the yacht club and yards of shipping containers to the Ravensbourne fertilizer plant and wharf. The sulphuric tang of super phosphate strikes my nostrils as I ride past the plant, its tangle of steel pipes and towers steaming away in the morning sun. A ship is pulled up alongside the wharf and cranes are hauling scoops of sulphur from its bowels. The Ravensbourne plant is one of only two in New Zealand that manufacture superphosphate by mixing imported phosphate rock with sulphuric acid. The end product, commonly known as “super” by New Zealand farmers, is the fertilizer that has fuelled New Zealand agriculture for 150 years.  It is essential to farming and thus to our economy, but a crisis looms – our hungry world is running out of phosphate.

Phosphorous is a mineral that occurs in all living things and is essential to life. Plants require phosphorous for photosynthesis and animals for cell growth and hormone activity.   New Zealand soils are naturally quite phosphorous-deficient. Farmers in the 19^th Century discovered that the application of superphosphate, which in those days was manufactured in Australia, vastly improved productivity, to the degree of up to 75%. From that point on, agriculture in this country was built on superphosphate.

In the 20^th century, large concentrations of phosphate (from bird guano) on the Pacific Island of Nauru were heavily exploited by Britain, New Zealand and Australia, to the point that the island’s reserves became depleted and its natural environment devastated.

Today most of the world’s phosphate comes from fossilized shell-bed deposits in Morocco and Western Sahara, a tiny desert country that Morocco invaded in 1975. Since the invasion Morocco has held Western Sahara in an iron grip, excluding the area’s original inhabitants, the Sahrawi, behind a 2,700 kilometre fortified sand wall that is the largest military installation on Earth. While the Sahrawi people live in refugee shanty-towns on the other side, the Moroccan government exports the wealth of Western Sahara, in the form of raw phosphate rock, to countries all around the world, including New Zealand.

Demand for phosphate has risen dramatically in the last decade, fuelled by the rapid agricultural development of China and India as well as the demands of crops for biofuel production. In 2007 the price of phosphate more than doubled, causing many New Zealand farmers to start questioning the future of this vital resource. The green pastures upon which we produce the tons of milk and meat that drive our economy, are, after all an artificially created environment, kept viable only by the heavy addition of phosphates.

There is no argument that the world’s phosphate resources are finite and rapidly diminishing. In 2008 the dramatic price spike caused some to argue that we had reached, or long-passed “peak P,” a concept analogous to the more widely known Peak Oil – the point at which supplies of phosphate fall behind demand and we begin sliding down a negative-sloping curve toward poverty and famine. However, others, such as grassland agronomist Peter Cornish, argue that the situation is not as dire as it seemed in 2008 – there are still substantial phosphate reserves to be exploited, but they are harder to get to or, as in the case of Western Sahara, fraught by political instability and uncertainty.

A potentially lucrative source of phosphate exists on the sea floor off New Zealand’s coast   – 100 million tons of phosphate nodules formed by the concretion of decaying organic matter over millions of years. Two companies are already exploring the Chatham Rise with a view to mining there in the next few years. However the environmental impacts of this activity are not well-understood. In Namibia there has been very vocal opposition to similar plans from fishermen who fear it will be highly destructive of benthic ecologies and could have major impacts on fish life off that coast.

Driving south from Dunedin along State Highway One, just before Milton, the abandoned Ewing’s phosphate works stands testament to an industry that sprang up in these South Otago hills in the early 1900′s. It’s ironic that these hills are now greened by imported phosphate, when a century ago, over a quarter of a million tons of phosphate were mined right here. The rising global price for the commodity has encouraged local farmer Tony McDonnell to re-open the quarry on his farm and now Ravensdown fertilizer sells his locally mined rock alongside imported phosphate.

Ewings phosphate works, Clarendon. Image: Freepik

When Ewing’s was in operation a century ago, phosphate was cheap and the effects of its regular application not so well understood as they are today. It made the grass grow and in huge quantities and so it became an established and accepted part of every farmer’s yearly budget. Today we know that only about half of the phosphate that is applied by farmers is taken up by plants in the first five years – the rest is stored in the soil – building up over the decades so that there is actually a huge amount of phosphate going to waste. Some of this is also washed into waterways where it damages freshwater and marine ecologies. There are also growing concerns about the build-up in our soils of cadmium, an element found in phosphates that in high levels can damage soil health and be toxic to humans.

If phosphate prices, along with shipping costs (in relation to rising oil prices,) continue to soar, more effective use of this mineral will become essential if farmers in New Zealand hope to survive this century. Substantial amounts of phosphate can be recovered from animal and human waste and processes for achieving this need to be more fully explored.

Seen in the light of dwindling phosphate reserves, New Zealand’s agricultural prosperity begins to look like a brief, artificial blooming of wealth based on a false economy. One farmer I talked to told me that without phosphate, New Zealand would be a third world country. The extent to which we are able to curb our dependence on phosphate or at least find ways to use it more efficiently may soon determine the validity of his words.

Image:DOC

By Bill Morris

On a glorious hot North Otago day over the weekend I dropped a cicada pattern in front of a cruising brown trout – instantly the fish turned and went for my fly. In haste I struck, but too early. The cicada yanked out of the predator’s jaws and I was left empty-handed and cursing loudly, adrenalin and disappointment mingling in that moment. The spooked trout charged off into the depths of the stream, pushing an ominous bow-wave ahead of it. As the ripples of the small drama settled, the water returned to the calm of the morning heat, its glassy surface broken only by the occasional swirl of another rising trout.

I grew up along these waterways and love the thrill of chasing trout here. The river is an ancient stream whose bends and channels have nurtured fish since the uplift of the mountains – native galaxiids, bullies and mud-fat eels, many of which made their way yearly up this river from the sea to breed.

Brown and rainbow trout were introduced to the river sometime in the late 1800’s and established themselves with gusto – today this is a world-renowned fishing stream and anglers come yearly from the United States, Europe and elsewhere to stalk its clear cold waters.

The construction of hydro-electric dams downstream from the 1930’s onward halted the migration of native fish species here. Eels are now rarely seen and those that are spotted are enormous. It is likely these monsters have lived here since the first dam went up, which would make them something like 80 years old. (for a powerful examination of the life of an eel in our rivers, have a look at Longfin, an award-winning Centre for Science Communication film from 2006.)

Fishing is so entrenched in our national culture that it’s sometimes easy to forget that trout are an introduced (and therefore invasive) species that has done enormous damage to our freshwater eco-systems. To the small native fish that once thrived in these streams, their introduction was the equivalent of releasing leopards into a field of lambs. While most people are well aware of the impact of introduced predators like possums and stoats in the mountains and forests of New Zealand, relatively few are as attuned to the threats facing our unique and endangered native fish species. While rare native birds are given world-class and expensive protection status, native fish such as eels and whitebait (which are the juvenile form of some of our galaxiid species) are harvested in large quantities and sold as a delicacy both domestically and internationally.

Our native fish contain within their bodies the dramatic story of our land, a story that encompasses the separation of continents, the thrusting up of enormous mountain ranges and rivers that turned tail and ran. Caught amongst this geological mayhem were the tiny galaxiids, of which New Zealand has 25 species. 20% of New Zealand’s galaxiid species are diadromous, which means they spend at least part of their lives at sea. Larvae hatched in rivers and streams are swept out to sea where they spend their first six months. These larvae have been found up to 700 miles offshore. As juvenile “whitebait,” they congregate around river mouths before making their way upstream. It is here that they are harvested by whitebaiters who can sell their catch for around NZ$70 a kilo.

At various stages, most galaxiid species in New Zealand apparently abandoned the difficult marine phase of their development and began breeding solely in the streams, rivers and lakes they called home. Isolated from one another, they evolved into the separate species we find living here today.
New Zealand, however, is no geological millpond. The clashing of continental plates threw up the Southern Alps in the last 30 million years, a process that is still happening today. As the landscape buckled, tore and subsequently fell apart, water, along with the galaxiids it contained, was moved and pushed across the land in different ways according to the new topographies. In several places in the South Island, whole rivers changed direction as uplift at one end sent the water flowing back the other way.

This reversal of one of these rivers, the Nevis in Central Otago, is reflected in the genetics of its fish. Molecular data has shown that the Smeagol galaxiid (an isolated and distinct form of the Gollum galaxiid, found only in the Nevis River) is more closely related to fish in the southern rivers the Nevis used to feed than to those in the Kawarau, into which it now drains. This is evidence this fish has evolved in isolation ever since the Nevis river changed direction hundreds of thousands of years ago. (In 2010 the presence of this little fish was instrumental in preventing the planned damming of the Nevis River for hydro-electric production.)

In other places, rivers were “captured” by neighbouring catchments as erosion broke down the ranges that divided them, or as the huge lakes of ice that joined their headwaters melted at the end of the last Ice Age. This allowed genetically separate species of galaxiid to inhabit the same waterways. Where these dramatic upheavals caused major environmental changes, such as the damming of a river to form a lake, or the reverse, other galaxiid populations would have rapidly gone extinct.

And so, like drops of mercury on a trampoline, populations of galaxiids diverged, evolved, re-connected and disappeared all across the landscape. Today these little fish can be found all over the country. In almost every branch of every river system they are genetically different. In some cases populations evolved to fit different environmental niches in the same waterway - ‘flathead’ galaxiids well adapted to riffles and rapids have been recorded living just a few metres away from ‘roundhead’ gollum galaxiids, which are better suited to the slower-moving water immediately downstream or upstream.

By studying the mitochondrial DNA of genetically different galaxiids, biologists, working in tandem with geologists, can construct an accurate picture of how New Zealand’s landscapes have changed over millions of years, and how the fish have evolved in reaction to these changes. Where geologists are in disagreement over the date of a particular event, evidence from the genetic material of galaxiids can sometimes provide the answer. The story of our country’s birth is recorded in their genes.

The arrival of trout and salmon, combined with habitat destruction and pollution of our streams and rivers, poses a major threat to our native fish. Our sports fish are here to stay and their presence in our rivers is safeguarded by legislation drafted at a time before native fish like galaxiids were regarded as having any inherent value. As I discussed in my last post, we often encounter a dilemma in New Zealand in which the value (commercial or otherwise) of an introduced species can eclipse the conservation imperatives of a native one. Here is another example. I will always enjoy trout fishing, but I’d love to think that one day there would be places that our native fish species could thrive unmolested by these fierce predators.

As University of Otago freshwater biologist Jon Waters (whose work forms much of the basis for this article) told me, if trout weren’t already here, we would probably still introduce them today;

“We just wouldn’t put them everywhere.”

By Bill Morris 

In 2003 I was employed on Stewart Island as part of a group of commercial divers tasked with controlling the spread of the invasive seaweed undaria pinnatifida in those waters. For weeks on end, in biting southerly snow or summer sun, we would swim the lines at the Big Glory Bay mussel farms and examine every mooring, ship bottom and wharf in Paterson’s Inlet, Halfmoon Bay and Bluff harbour. If we found an undaria specimen, we’d carefully prise it off, trying to get every last piece of its root structure before destroying it. It was a war without end – every time we’d return to an infested site, there’d be more plants to collect. Undaria spores settle on a suitable substrate and germinate into gametophytes that can lie dormant, and therefore invisible, for years before sprouting into the delicate brown ribbons of the young undaria plant.

Undaria is a species of kelp native to the shores of Korea and Japan, where it is known as wakame and highly prized as a food. In Japan you might find it floating in your miso soup – the Japanese have long recognized its health benefits and have farmed it for hundreds of years. However, the algae has another less-endearing propensity – it is a ferociously successful marine invader. Undaria has a history of finding its way across the globe, establishing itself in the marine environments of other countries and easily shouldering out the native species. Within a few years, entire underwater environments can be changed – complex ecologies of sponges, algaes, and other marine life overtaken by a waving forest of the dark brown undaria fronds. The Global Invasive Species database lists undaria pinnafitida as one the 100 world’s worst invasive species. Undaria has no trouble moving around the sea – ships’ hulls provide a perfect substrate for the algae and vessels left stationary in an undaria-growing area will soon be trailing a brown lacy veil of undaria that will grow into bulky plants many metres in length if left unchecked. Undaria’s tiny spores can also be taken up in ballast water and carried across vast ocean distances.

It is believed this is how undaria arrived in New Zealand, where it was discovered in Wellington harbour in 1987. Since then, it has been accidentally carried around much of the coast and become well-established in a number of harbours from Gisborne to Stewart Island. In some places, like the Marlborough Sounds, undaria has displaced much of the native kelp and now clogs the reef systems. It causes a major headache for marine aquaculture as it binds up mussel lines and makes harvesting a much more difficult job. When I started working on Stewart island, the mussel farms in Big Glory Bay were free of almost entirely free of undaria. When the mussels were young, the lines were clean, white and held only the tiny mussel spat. As time went on the lines grew heavy and sagged deeper into the green-black gloom of the bay. The lines aged and foliated – native algaes, barnacles, sea squirts and sponges sprouted everywhere on the artificial reefs they provided, building leafy marine cities where little fish and crabs found refuge. One day, the aquaculture company imported a new batch of spat from the Marlborough Sounds – as soon as we dived in to give it its monthly check, we knew we had a major problem – the otherwise clean new lines were sprouting tiny undaria fronds everywhere. Those spat had been thoroughly checked and cleaned before being brought south, but the algae had resisted.

In 2004, the Department of Conservation abandoned its war on Stewart Island’s undaria infestation as too costly and ultimately futile. Today, the focus is on preventing its spread to other more remote corners of New Zealand’s waters, in particular Fiordland, the Chatham Islands and the sub-Antarctic Islands. This involves regular checks of boat hulls and underwater surveys of mooring lines and anchorages in those places. In 2010 a single undaria plant was found in Breaksea Sound in Fiordland. The relevant authorities have combined forces to stop it spreading from there – Fiordland’s utterly unique marine environment is at stake if they are unsuccessful. However, given undaria’s invasive proficiency, this too may prove to be a lost cause.

Since undaria established itself here, there have been calls from various parties to be allowed to harvest it commercially. It has been grown commercially in France since the early 1980’s after its accidental introduction there in 1971. Most of the demand for seaweed as a food source is in Asia, which is mostly able to meet its own demands. However, with New Zealand’s growing Asian population, a local market for fresh wakame does exist here. In addition, farmed seaweed has commercial value as a fertilizer and fish food and the hydrocolloids that can be extracted from the algae and find uses as gelling and thickening agents. Research has shown the heath benefits of eating seaweeds – they are rich in many minerals and antioxidants and may reduce cholestrol, boost immune systems and reduce joint pain. And so, just a few weeks ago, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries announced it would lift the ban on commercial farming of undaria in three places – Wellington, Banks Peninsular and Marlborough. Operators will now be able to cultivate and harvest the algae in these areas, which are already infested with it.

Another fascinating possibility recently raised by US research is using genetically engineered microbes capable of metabolizing the sugars in seaweeds to create biofuel. Unlike land-grown biofuel crops like corn and sugar cane, seaweed cultivation does not take up valuable arable land and there is the potential to create huge amounts of clean fuel from a relatively small area of ocean.

Turning an invasive species into a commercial venture raises interesting questions around the philosophy of conservation in New Zealand. From my own experience with undaria I know the difficulties of stemming the onward rush of a invading species in a marine environment. On the land, pine trees and gorse can be controlled in small areas, but in general their steady march across our native landscapes continues largely unchecked. Rabbits, deer, pigs, possums, stoats and cats continue to ravage our grasslands and forests despite millions and millions of dollars and many years of effort spent fighting them. When deer numbers exploded out of control and their sheer numbers began causing immense damage to alpine and bush areas, government-paid cullers were hired to try and stem the tide, however ultimately it was a lucrative commercial industry for venison that was most successful in significantly reducing deer numbers.  The experience with deer shows that commercial interests can have a positive impact in reducing pest numbers. Obviously in the case of undaria, commercial farming will do nothing to slow the spread of the algae around our coastlines – it is more about making the best of a bad situation.

The sheer volume of ocean, land and air traffic today means we are essentially powerless to stop the continued spread of plant and animal species from other parts of the world. But then species have always migrated around the world, even without the assistance of people. Long-distance dispersal has transported plants, birds and insects to many utterly remote islands. Natural environments, in biogeographical time-frames, are in a constant state of change and flux. The extent to which we try and halt this flow in our time is the dilemma our governments and the regulatory bodies charged with protecting our landscapes must face.

What are your thoughts?

By Bill Morris 

Last weekend I headed over to South Westland to do some research for a TV show. I have spent quite a bit of time in the area between Haast and Jackson’s Bay over the last few years and always love returning there, no matter what the weather!  Historically and scientifically, South Westland is a world apart from the rest of New Zealand. It is a fringe land – for most of its history beyond the reach of road and rail; a kingdom of rain and sandflies, greenstone, tumultuous rivers and long wild beaches shot with veins of gold-bearing black sand.

The people of South Westland are resilient pioneering types, many of who are descended from the area’s first pioneers and who have survived to make their home in this wild area.

South Westland is shaped first and foremost by the Alpine fault. The fault here is no abstract concept on a geological map, it is a highly visible battle line between two continental plates whose violence has thrown up the mountains that stand over the landscape and the lives of the people who live here. The mountains are what separates this land from the rest of the world, the mountains that provide the wealth of the region, mountains that make the rain and mountains that funnel that rain into the big, austere rivers that emerge out onto the coast.

During the Ice Age, this whole area was covered by an enormous glacier that emerged and merged from the separate valleys and would have reached the sea as one enormous wall of ice. Upon its retreat, six large rivers poured out of the mountains; scouring, sorting and carrying the crumbling debris from the interior. In the relatively fast (geologically-speaking) time span of just 6000 years, they built up the 10 kilometre-wide floodplain upon which the commerce and history of this region has largely unfolded.

The reason for the rapid advancement of the floodplain is simply the vast amount of material that pours out of the mountains here. The two biggest contributers of sediment are the Haast and Arawhata rivers, which between them produce over 13 million tones of suspended sediment each year, making them two of the most productive rivers in New Zealand.

Once this material has reached the coast, it is subject to the slow power of the sea, which shifts it north along the coast, forming long spits, bars and dune ridges. From the air, the remnants of old dune ridges are clearly visible and now form barriers that hold unusual patterned wetlands.

The floodplains today hold vast pakihi swamps and largely pristine native forest. The rainforest in this region is astonishingly rich. A couple of years ago, I made a video on the region with Emeritus Professor Sir Alan Mark and Katharine Dickinson in the area. Sir Alan, a tireless campaigner for New Zealand’s natural heritage, was instrumental in gaining UNESCO World Heritage status for the area which protects it from future exploitation.

Off shore, the Open Bay Islands are remnants of a limestone outcrop that survived the ancient glacier’s onslaught. Today they are a Maori-owned wildlife reserve, home to fur seals, muttonbirds, Fiordland crested penguins and an endemic species of skink. There is even a tiny population of endemic leeches on the island. The islands are the most species-rich pieces of land on the West Coast.

photo: Hugh Best

In 1810 a party of sealers were marooned on the Open Bay Islands for four years, and the remains of their hut can still be found there – the oldest European building relic in New Zealand.

South Westland is a fascinating and addictive area to explore. Check out my video for more insight thanks to one of the area’s greatest champion, Sir Alan Mark…..

…in which my travels in the sub-antarctic region of New Zealand continue.

After years of looking at pictures of remote Campbell Island, I was surprised to find it on arrival neither as cold nor as inhospitable as I had thought. Rather my impression was of a lush, rain and windswept landscape reminiscent of the South Island high country, only at sea level. Climbing off the zodiac at the wharf, we were immediately met by a harrumphing sea lion bull and a couple of rare Campbell Island teal. These endemic flightless ducks were thought to be extinct on Campbell Island until they were rediscovered living on tiny Dent Island in 1975. DOC has since done a lot of work to help the species recover, including a long-running breeding programme. Seen close-up, they are incredibly charming ducks – unafraid of people and possessing a sort of feathery meekness that is sort of irresistible. I’m an instant fan.

The extremely rare Campbell Island Teal

Flush with the awareness of actually being on Campbell Island, we tramp through tall, soaking poa tussock, past a pile of elephant seals slumped in a ditch who looked up sleepily at us.  Elephant seals molt their fur during the summer and at this time they are vulnerable to the cold, so to conserve energy they find a comfortable spot and park up for a few weeks, often huddled together to keep warm.

Elephant seals molting

 Campbell Island is devoid of trees, save for one Sitka spruce, planted in 1907. With its nearest arboreal companion almost 200 miles away on the Auckland Islands, the spruce is now somewhat famous as the “loneliest tree in the world.” The most common tall foliage on the island is a thick tangled dracophyllum scrub, through which it would be almost impossible to pass were it not for the tracks that have been cut through it to give access to the distant corners of the island. Dracophyllum, whose Latin names translates as  ”dragon-leaf” and which is named for its prehistoric appearance, is common and widespread throughout New Zealand, Australia and New Caledonia. New Zealand has more than 30 varieties that range greatly in form from tall bushes to tiny cushion-plants. Research shows that the species most probably spread to New Zealand via wind-blown seeds long after the country had broken away from Gondwanaland. Upon arrival in New Zealand, the species initially found itself part of a very small gene-pool, thus mutations were common and the pressures of natural selection severe. In a relatively short time, therefore, the plant evolved in many different directions to fill a number of niches on the mainland and on offshore islands like Campbell, where it forms a kind on miniature forest across much of the island. It is believed the dracophyllum longifolium sub-species predominant on Campbell Island is only a relatively recent immigrant, arriving there by wind or sea around 7000 years ago.

Amidst dracophyllum "forest"

Campbell Island is thought to have erupted from the sea 6-11 million years ago, so it’s probable that may of its species spread here via dispersal – travelling on the wind and ocean currents to fetch up on its remote shores. As in all of the subantarctic islands, many of the plant, insect and bird species here are endemic.

In 1894 Campbell Island was offered by the government for lease for sheep farming. In those days, high wool prices made such an option attractive, despite the 700 miles of ocean that separate Campbell Island from the nearest commercial port. Farming continued under various leases until 1929, when a slump in wool prices, coupled with a decrease in shipping access to the island made Campbell Island’s last farmer destitute. He returned to the mainland, leaving his 5000 sheep to wander the island for the next 60 years.  The stock were progressively culled out and the last of them removed in 1992.

What followed in 2001 was an incredibly ambitious programme to eradicate rats from Campbell Island. The rats had been introduced sometime after 1810 and in the intervening decades had destroyed most of the native birdlife on the island. The programme involved four helicopters and 120 tons of poisoned bait and against the odds was a complete success. As a result, the island is now completely free of introduced animals.

Among the bird species that had been persecuted by rats was the Campbell Island snipe. (coenocrypha aucklandica perseverance) The snipe was not even known  to exist until 1997 when a group of scientists searching for Campbell Island teal on the inhospitable, rat-free, finger of rock called Jaquemart Island discovered a few living there. The bird was named after the brig Perseverance that discovered Campbell island in 1810 and wrecked there in 1828. Ironically, it may have been the Perseverance that first brought the Norwegian rat to the island.

Since the rats have been eradicated, the snipe has recolonized the main island, and while still exceedingly rare, are now making a gradual comeback from the brink of extinction.

Stumbling through tussock, we were lucky enough to see one of these amusing and very friendly birds on the path ahead and I was able to snap this picture…

The wonderful Campbell Island snipe (right). The bird in the background is a New Zealand pipit.

My travels of Campbell Island will continue in the next blog post….

A return to local broadcast for Dunedin’s esteemed natural history film company, NHNZ.

This film features incredible HD footage shot using the company’s ultra-fancy Phantom camera and tells the story of the unusual evolution of some of New Zealand’s most famous wildlife

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/television/news/article.cfm?c_id=339&objectid=10778072

Two foreign vessels fishing for the valuable Antarctic toothfish in the New-Zealand administered Ross Sea have met with trouble in recent months, sparking costly rescue missions and posing a real risk to the last untouched marine ecosystem on Earth.
Here’s the story so far ….

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10778122

And for more information on the Ross Sea and the implications of fishing activity there, visit

www.lastocean.co.nz

Sea Lions amidst bubinella rossi, Enderby Island

Fighting our way around inquisitive/aggressive bull sea lions on the beach, we make our way to across Enderby island, walking through lush meadows of bulbinella rossii, which has just finished flowering.

On the northern side, tumultuous swells crash and break against the volcanic fringes of the island. It was on these jagged shores that the Derry Castle met her fate in 1877 – the seven survivors straggling to shore and surviving bitter hardships for several months. They broke into the castaway depot set up for just such an occasion, to find it contained only a bottle of salt, having been raided previously by a sealing gang.

The northern shore of Enderby, Anisotome megaherb in foreground

Enderby Island is a pest-free haven for sub-Antarctic wildlife and every step brings new discovery – pipits and the occasional snipe scurrying about in the tall tussock grass; Auckland Island cormorants and Sooty albatross nesting together on a rugged, exposed cliff face, sea lions in tall grass and yellow-eyed penguins shuffling out of the sea and up across grassy slopes to seek refuge in the stunted rata forest.

To enter the Enderby rata forest is a special experience  -like walking into a cool, green, woody cathedral, its floor littered with blood-red rata flowers amongst the sprawling mega-herbs.  Sea lions enter the forest along with peguins, while Auckland Island tomtits flit amongst the branches.

Stunted rata forest, Enderby island, with megaherbs in foreground

The Auckland Islands tomtit, endemic to the islands

Endemism is a recurring theme amongst the fauna in the se sub-Antarctic Islands. An endemic species is one which naturally occurs in one particular place exclusively. While many of the bird species on the Auckland Islands resemble their counterparts on the mainland, their long time in isolation has seen them evolve in subtly different directions. Consequently, birds like the Auckland Islands tomtit, the Auckland Islands cormorant and the Auckland Island flightless teal are considered separate sub-species that occur only on these wild islands.

The rate of evolution on islands has been shown to be very rapid compared to evolution on the mainland at least for a short initial period as species quickly evolve to accommodate environmental niches on islands that are different from those experienced by their mainland counterparts.

A common theme of island evolution amongst birds and insects is the loss of flight capability. Birds on islands usually lose the ability to fly because they are no longer being hunted by land-based mammals. The Auckland Islands teal is closely related to the Brown Teal endemic to the New Zealand mainland, but unlike that species, which retains some flight capability, both these two sub-species have completely lost the ability to fly. The Auckland Island teals appear to have taken that particular evolutionary path to its conclusion.

Auckland Islands Teal

The Auckland Islands teal were once plentiful, but suffered the fate of flightess, ground-nesting birds everywhere with the introduction of mammalian predators. Thanks to the extermination of introduced pests, the species has now recovered to some degree on Enderby Island.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about my recent trip to some of New Zealand’s sub- Antarctic Islands with Heritage Expeditions. The first installment is in the Auckland Islands….

South! And it’s good to feel the sea rolling under me again. The Spirit of Enderby is bound for the Auckland Islands, 465 kilometres south of Bluff; lonely volcanic skeletons crumbling into the Southern Ocean – isolated snags in the furious 50’s, tiny specks of dry land between the mainland and Antarctica.

Southward bound. Photo: Bill Morris

After two lively nights being thrown around by a good-sized westerly swell, the other passengers and I finally awoke to find ourselves in Port Ross at the northern end of the group. The Auckland Islands are the remnants of two large volcanoes that erupted from the Campbell plateau 10-25 million years ago. It is thought they were “hot-spot” eruptions,  volcanoes that occur in a place where the continental plate is sliding across an unusually hot portion of the Earth’s mantle caused by massive plumes of magma that boil up from the Earth’s core.

(Other examples of hot-spot vulcanism are the Hawaii and Society Islands, including Tahiti. However research suggests that this explanation may not be true for all supposed “hot-spot” volcanos. Many mid-plate volcanoes, such as the Pitcairn Islands, may in fact be formed when the plate that hosts them begins tearing in the middle as a result of enormous friction along one of its edges.)

The Auckland Islands. (Image from Wikipedia)

In the time since their eruption, the Auckland Islands have been heavily eroded by wind, rain and glaciers and the sea has gradually crept in to form long fiords and harbours in their sides. One of these harbours, Port Ross, separates Enderby Island to the north and it is to Enderby that we make our first landing of the trip at Sandy Bay.

The Auckland Islands have a long history of failed settlement, starting here on Enderby. Remnants of Polynesian cooking have been found at Sandy Bay indicating Maori explorers reached this far south in around 1200AD as part of the great Diaspora that saw them settle the New Zealand mainland. It’s incredible to think that people could find their way to this tiny speck of inhospitable land in this vast ocean so long ago – it also begs the question – why? With hundreds of thousands of hectares of relatively benign land to colonize, what drove these ancient navigators this far south? Were they forced off the mainland by hostile tribes, or was it simply the desire to keep exploring beyond the limits of the known world? We will probably never know, just as we will never know who exactly these people were and what eventually happened to them.

Another group of Maori, exiled from the Chatham Islands found their way here in 1842 and were later incorporated in the Enderby Settlement in 1849. This settlement was an ill-concieved attempt by a well-known British whaling firm to set up a whaling station and agricultural base that only lasted a few years until a  lack of whales, ill-discipline and the harsh weather conditions  forced its closure. There were two subsequent attempts at farming sheep and cattle on the islands, both of which were abandoned after just a few years in the face of storms and poor growing conditions.

The Spirit of Enderby, moored in Port Ross. (picture taken from Enderby Island) (photo:Bill Morris)

Today, the islands are empty of people, although the years of settlement have left their mark in terms of introduced pests. The main Auckland Island is crawling in pigs and cats that have had a major impact on the island’s flora and fauna. Bizarrely, however, despite numerous shipwrecks and years of habitation, rats, which have caused so much damage on the mainland and on other sub-Antarctic islands, never made it ashore on the Aucklands.

While the main island is still plagued by these animals, the much smaller Enderby Island is today pest-free. This is largely due to eradication programmes that have removed mice, as well as the rabbits and cattle which had been originally left there to provide a food source for castaways.

(The last Enderby island cow, which somehow escaped the bullets of the eradication team, was rescued by a team of rare breeds enthusiasts, taken back to New Zealand and made part of a Massey University cloning programme. Today a handful of these cattle, both cloned and naturally bred from a cloned ancestor, are all that’s left of what had evolved in isolation to become a unique breed of cow, well suited to the harsh conditions on Enderby.)

The Hooker's Sea Lion colony at Sandy Beach, Enderby Island. (Photo:Bill Morris)

Our zodiacs run up onto Sandy Bay where we immediately find ourselves admidst hundreds of Hooker’s sea lions – this is the largest remaining breeding colony for these animals in the world. Piles of silky-gold females and wrinkled pups crowd the sand while the big, noisy males charge around, fighting and grunting amongst each other. Amidst it all, skuas and giant petrels skulk around looking for scraps of placenta to feed on. It is a scene of ritualistic chaos that has been played out here in the Auckland Islands for millions of years

Skua fight for a sea lion placenta (Photo: Bill Morris)

The males are jostling for position among the females –the dominant bulls control harems of up to 15 females and seemingly spend most of their time fighting off challengers. For some, control of a harem may last only days or even hours as one false move sees them ousted by a stronger or smarter competitor. Female sea lions, which spend most of their lives pregnant, will mate and hold the fertilized egg dormant in their bodies for three months, before conceiving once they’ve had time to feed and fatten in preparation for the nine-month gestation of the next pup.

Dominant bull with his harem of females (Photo: Bill Morris)

A young sea lion pup. Numbers of sea lions breeding at Enderby are steadily decreasing. (Photo:Bill Morris)

The large number of sea lions here is deceiving –this species is in real trouble. What we are witnessing here at Sandy Bay would once have been a common sight around New Zealand, but over 700 years of hunting have left the mainland almost totally devoid of breeding colonies. (A single female – affectionately known as “Mum” has recently started breeding in Otago)

Worringly, numbers of sea lions returning to breed at the Auckland Islands are steadily decreasing. A recent DOC report found that the major cause of the decline is most likely to be the impact of squid fishing in the area. Squid are a major food source for sea lions, and when fishing boats, (many foreign, but catching New Zealand quota,) rake the sea with their giant trawl nets, they not only deprive sea lions of a food source, but also catch a significant number of feeding animals as well. If unable to escape the trawl net, the sea lion will drown in it. Vessels are now required to use sea lion exclusion devices that provide an escape route for the trapped and frightened animal to escape the net. However, while this certainly allows more sea lions to escape, it is unclear whether they are able to do so without sustaining fatal injuries first. What is clear is that sea lion numbers in this, their most important breeding ground are dropping, while at another, smaller, colony on Campbell Island, they are not. The only relevant difference between the two locations is that the Auckland Islands hosts a squid fishery, while Campbell doesn’t.

Despite these findings and although the Department of Conservation has upgraded the status of these sea lions to Nationally Critically Endangered, the government is now proposing to lift an existing quota on accidental sea lion deaths for the fishery, thus removing any protection for the animals in favour of giving free rein to the multi-million dollar global squid industry.

Keep an eye for unfolding developments in the news.

Next week in this blog, I’ll take you on a walking tour of the incredible Enderby Island and introduce you to some of the locals.