New Zealand Conservation News

Small white butterfly ( Pieris rapae ) Today I have a little story based around a research paper which I just read. It turns out that female butterflies have an organ in their reproductive tract that is similar in some ways to a stomach/intestine.   This organ, called the bursa copulatrix, digests the male butterfly's spermatophore proteins but little was known about how it functioned before this study. The study was carried out on the small white/small cabbage white/white butterfly ( Pieris rapae ).   The small white is not a New Zealand native, but was introduced to New Zealand long ago and is now well established throughout the country, even reaching the subantarctic islands.   The small white caterpillar eats human agricultural crops (cabbage and other brassicas in particular), and so has been able to spread from its native range in Europe, Asia, and Africa across the globe following human agriculture and is now found in North and South America and Australia as wel

Yellow-bellied sea snake (Hydrophis platurus) Most people believe that New Zealand is entirely free of snakes.   While that is largely correct, it is not entirely correct.   There are four species of snakes which have been found naturally in New Zealand.   All of them, however, are sea snakes.   The most commonly seen species is a type of hydrophiine sea snake, the yellow-bellied sea snake ( Hydrophis platurus, formerly Pelamis platurus ), while the other three species are all types of krait. The hydrophiine sea snakes are a fully pelagic (ocean-going) species of snake which does not ever need to come to land for any reason and are much better adapted to life in the open ocean than the kraits.   They hatch their young live (viviparous), so they do not need to return to land to lay eggs.   Although they cannot drink salt water, they drink fresh water as it strikes the surface of the ocean during rainy periods before it has a chance to mix with the seawater.   As a result, th

Antipodes Island parakeet (Cyanoramphus unicolor). This one is on pavement, instead of Antipodes Island. The big news of the month is the return of the survey crew from the Antipodes Island chain with the excellent news that they were unable to find any signs of mice after two mouse breeding seasons have passed and the islands have now officially been declared free of mice.  I have been watching this process over the past several years with excitement, in no small part because I was the captive coordinator for the Antipodes Island parakeet Cyanoramphus unicolor , a unique small parrot found only there. Yes, they are eating a bird. When you live on a cold, windswept, subantarctic island you take what you can get. The other native parrot also eats meat. The Antipodes Islands are a series of small subantarctic islands (2,100 hectares in total) composed of the larger Antipodes Island (~2,000 hectares) surrounded by a number of much smaller islands, all formed by volcanic act

This is the ocean. See how much hotter it looks? For the first time, New Zealand's NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) and Australia's Bureau of Meteorology have released a joint special climate statement discussing the extreme weather seen over the Summer of 2017-2018.  Their statement notes that the water temperature in the Tasman Sea in November increased dramatically, reaching 2°C or higher above average temperatures over an extremely large area.  The patch of warmer water reached all the way from Tasmania and southeast mainland Australia to New Zealand.  This level of ocean heating has never been seen before and was a major factor behind the highest November and December temperatures that Tasmania has ever seen as well as New Zealand's hottest Summer on record.  Although ocean temperatures in the Tasman Sea will sometimes rise dramatically during the Summer months, the geographic size of the temperature rises are usually limited in scope.

Male stitchbird/hihi (Notiomystis cincta) from Tiritiri Matangi. Not sure how fast his sperm is. Hello all, I can think of no post better to start off this new blog than a report on the Great Hihi Sperm Race, a fundraiser for hihi/stitchbird Notiomystis cincta  conservation.  Stitchbirds are a bird species that, while once common throughout New Zealand's North Island, nearly went extinct and is still in a bad way.  By the 1880's the species was confined to Little Barrier Island/Hauturu, and even today is still limited to only seven small populations.  Species recovery is plagued by a number of issues and they desperately need funding so they have come up with a novel idea: a stitchbird sperm race.  If you go to their website you can choose one of the males from one of four study sites and place a $10 (or more) bet on him, if you think he looks like he has particularly speedy sperm.  Dr. Helen Taylor from Otago University took videos of the sperm of 128 stitchbirds in orde