Daniel B Thomas, Jeffrey H Robinson, Daphne E Lee, The University of Otago The Geology Museum at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka—University of Otago smells of old wood and older rocks. The walls are lined with ...

Soot. Charred coconut. Water. Turtle bone, sharpened into teeth and tied to a stick. These, as far as we can tell, were the Tokelauan tools of tā tatau, the sacred art of tattooing. Women were marked ...

For centuries, the Taiari River has woven a shining tangle across its floodplain, pushing water across soil and gravel in an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of bends, oxbows and dry water-scars. Once, ...

The young hairworm, coiled up in the belly of the wētā, was ready to move out and find a mate. For months, the worm had lived inside the wētā, stealing its resources by simply existing: the worm did ...

Karlo Mila builds poetry from data and documents. Day three of oral submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill and Karlo Mila is nervous as hell. She’s been up since 4.30am, writing. Was still writing ...

Picture a map of New Zealand. Now delete the land. What you’re left with is a vascular system pumping fresh water: swampy hearts, lakes, rivers, thousands of trickling capillaries. This is the ...

In New Zealand’s national parks and remote areas, conservation managers cull feral cats to save many bird, reptile and invertebrate lives. That’s not possible in urban nature reserves, where there’s a ...

A new interactive tool illuminates the fraught world of the whale, overlaying tracking data for seven species with hazards such as noise and plastic pollution, ocean traffic and offshore construction.

In 2023, a team of University of Auckland researchers organised workshops across Northland and Auckland—19 of them, involving a demographically diverse group of 176 people, aged from 16 to 25. The ...

Dangerous fungal spores can survive stratospheric travel, Swiss scientists have found—which may explain how devastating fungal diseases such as myrtle rust skip between continents. The stratosphere ...

Look at the centre of the image above. Now slightly to the right. That’s a New Zealand jumping spider—one of a whole new genus discovered by Lincoln University master’s student Robin Long. Her ...