The mantis shrimp is the most extraordinary thing you’ve never heard of. It’s one of the most impressive predators in the ocean, and kills in milliseconds. It can see things you can barely conceive of ...

What would New Zealand be without kiwi? Without Fiordland rainforest, or the haunting call of kōkako? If we run down our ...

Don’t call them swamps. Bogs soak up and store more carbon than forests do, but when they’re drained and used for agriculture, that immense amount of carbon is slowly released. The entrance to one of ...

At night, the only light in the warehouse comes from row upon row of truck-sized tanks, each lit from within like a gigantic lava lamp. The contents roil, the colours shifting with the movement from ...

Introduced over 150 years ago as the basis for a fur trade, the Australian brush-tail possum has instead become an ecological plague, chomping its way through millions of tonnes of forest foliage a ...

In the South Island’s remote subalpine regions, a highly terrestrial songbird—one of two surviving species of New Zealand wren—has hopped, chirped and flown in the face of extinction. There are four ...

The bittern’s eerie, booming call sounds like a lament, a tangi ringing across the marshes. Now, the birds themselves are in trouble. A bittern’s mottled brown and beige plumage helps it blend into ...

Gibson’s and Antipodean albatrosses are citizens of no one nation. They are ocean birds, living on the wind and waves, travelling massive distances, passing back and forth over the high seas and the ...

Between 6–10 metres of rain falls in Fiordland each year. An incredible amount. It’s part of what powers the forest-to-fiord carbon storage pump that makes Fiordland exceptionally good at locking away ...

Kina numbers have exploded as we’ve eaten too many of their predators – like big snapper and crayfish – that usually keep them in check. The urchins munch through kelp and seaweed, leaving bare rock ...

Hundreds of snapper are floating in the sea off Auckland, and are washing up dead or dying on beaches off the Hauraki Gulf. Fisheries New Zealand is warning the public not to eat the fish “for safety ...

The release of Disney’s Moana in te reo was a landmark for Māori language revitalisation. As that rebirth gathers steam, mita, or dialects are returning to the fore. When The Lion King Reo Māori hit ...