A whale of a time!

Yesterday marked the end of my last voyage for the Fellowship on Hawere. Once again we were collecting and processing herbivorous fish. In addition to Kendall, Lindsay and Lilly from my first trip, we also has PhD student Selena on board, who was doing some pretty gross stuff with guts and bacteria - actually it was fascinating!

A bonus this trip was encountering a number of Bryde's Whales feeding near where we working at Great Barrier Island. At one stage there was a large school of pilchards (a small fish like a sardine) forced up to the surface. Gannets were diving in for a feed, other seabirds were also getting in there, dolphins were coralling the fish and plucking them off the edges of the school, and through the middle these massive whales were coming in for their share. A fascinating behaviour was observed where the whales were making a bubble curtain, from deep below, to keep the pilchards pinned to the surface. It was amazing to see.
There are plenty of seabirds to look at out there, but we were lucky enough to be visited by a rather hungry mollymawk, which is a member of the albatross family. It wasn't sure enough of me to feed from my hand, but came very close.
I also was able to take some time to do a little underwater photography. The fish in the picture are silver drummer, one of the species we had been sampling. They grow to about 10kg, but these ones were 2-3kg. As you can see the water was beautiful and clear.
One of the samples we had to take from the fish was a blood sample, as nutrients from the gut end up in the bloodstream. Here you can see Kendall extracting blood from a marblefish.

Once again I had a fantastic time observing science in action, and I would like to thank Kendall, Lindsay, and their marvellous students for sharing their expertise and ideas. Now I have to work out how to translate it into the classroom!

Drummer Boy

Kendall Clements from the University of Auckland is New Zealands expert on fish from the drummer family, in fact some of the work he is doing makes him a world expert. Up until relatively recently, it was thought that there was only one species of drummer in New Zealand, the silver drummer. Thanks to Kendall and others, we now know there are at least 4 species here. On our trip to Great Barrier Island last week we speared fish of three different species. The common species, silver drummer, is on the bottom photo. The other fish is an as yet un-named species, Kyphosus bigibbus. If you look at the two fish you can see the differences in the shape of the body, especially the nose, and the shape of the fins. It was neat to be part of science finding more about the biodiversity of New Zealand's seas!

Beautiful Barrier

I’ve just returned from another fantastic trip to Great Barrier Island, on the Hawere once again, with Associate Professor Kendall Clements from the University of Auckland. Our mission for this trip was to collect two species of fish, parore and silver drummer. Blake from California is completing his Masters degree’ looking at nutrient absorption in silver drummer. Tabea from Germany is completing a PhD with a similar, but more complex project on parore. We had perfect weather, with brilliant days, beautiful sunsets, clear water, and cold air! It is winter after all!

My job once again was to collect the fish, causing as little damage to the fish, while killing them humanely. It meant long, but pleasurable days in the water. Once again, these scientists were very happy to share with me their work, their methods and ideas. I was pleased to be useful to them in their projects.

Even better, I return for another trip next week!

Searchin' for Urchins

About ten years ago I was diving at Flat Island, north of the Bay of Islands, when I found a colony of neat little urchins under a boulder. I grabbed one, and sent it to NIWA for identification, and they identified it as Goniocidaris corona, a rare species, recorded at the Bay of Islands (once) and the Poor Knights islands. When I was at NIWA a month or so back, scientist Owen Anderson asked me about it, as the had apparently mislaid my specimen, the only specimen they had. I decided if I had an opportunity I would go back and see if I could find them. That opportunity came yesterday when I went searching for fish for Professor Kendall Clements up at Flat Island. Unfortunately, despite a thorough look using a torch to probe under rocks and in crevices, I failed to find any. I suspect they are not very common, but I am determined to continue looking! This coming week I am back out with Kendall, and the University of Auckland, where we will be collecting specimens of herbivorous fish from Great Barrier Island.

Southern Right Whales

Winter is the time of the year when the Southern Right Whale or Tohora are most likely to be seen in our waters. At times they come into very shallow water, and a few years ago one spent time inside Port Taranaki.

Southern Right Whales are beginning to rebuild their numbers since whaling ended, but the population is still small.

One way of finding out about the population of whales is to identify them. In New Zealand there are two main ways to identify them. The first way is by photograph. If you can take a photo of a whale's head, the chances are it can be identified. On a right whale's head are pale lumps, called callosities. Each whale is unique in the shape and position of these, and so can be identified.

The other way to identify them is by taking a small sample of flesh. This is done by firing a special dart from a gun. The dart has a hollow point which takes a very small amount of flesh. You van see the dart if you look carefully at the circle on one of the photos below. The more we can find out about these whales, the more we can do to protect them. If you are out in a boat over winter, make sure you have a camera at the ready! If you have sighted or photographed a whale, send the sighting info, or photo, to Callum Lilley at DOC - clilley@doc.govt.nz


Photos supplied by Callum Lilley and Bryan Williams (DOC)

Marine Reserve Maintenance

Marine reserves can be difficult beasts to manage. It is impossible in practical terms to put a fence around them, unlike mainland reserves. The next best thing is to try and mark the boundaries, and at Tapuae Marine Reserve, the boundaries are marked by a number of buoys. Unfortunately, the sea being the place that it is, these buoys sometimes get broken off and lost. The other day we wend searching for the mooring for one buoy that had disappeared. Imagine trying to search for something that you only have a vague idea of where it is, and you can only see 2 metres in front of you! After spending some time trying to find it, we eventually gave up and went and checked some of the other buoys.

Floating in the ocean, the buoys attract their own marine life. Each buoy was covered in a thick mat of seaweed, and barnacles. The ropes were weighed down with mussels. If they were left to grow, they would eventually cause the buoy to sink, and so they have to be cleared. With Callum on SCUBA, and starting at the bottom, I started at the top and worked my way down, scraping thousands of small mussels off the rope.

It turns out the mussels were home to thousands of other creatures - crabs, worms, and most of all, amphipods. Amphipods are small crustaceans, in the same family as sandhoppers. When we got out of the water, our wetsuits were a crawling mass of these amphipods! We washed most of them off into the sea. It was amazing to see how the mussels created their own ecosystem.

Rotokare Rambling

Today I joined Janet King, also on a Primary Science Teacher Fellowship, at Lake Rotokare near Eltham. Lake Rotokare has become a mainland island - encircled by a predator proof fence. Rats, stoats, goats, pigs, possums and hedgehogs have been eliminated from the area, and mice are next on the list. The fence prevents them from re-entering the area. Our job today was to walk the fence, one inside, one outside, to look for damage or evidence of incursions by animals. While we found no holes, we found plenty of evidence of rabbits at least trying to dig under the fence. These holes we filled in with the help of a spade. The fence gets checked each week.

Once inside, it was heartening to see the lush undergrowth, and healthy canopy of trees, and there were kereru, tui, fantails and more everywhere. It is great to see a massive conservation effort being so successful.