Our Changing World

We might think deep-sea squid look a bit strange, but if they have the capacity for it, they would likely consider us monsters! Claire speaks to a squidologist and a PhD candidate about their research trying to understand more about the lives of deep-sea squid.

When you picture where creatures live on Earth, what do you see?

A tropical jungle? A highland pasture? An inland lake? Maybe a rocky seashore? 

All of it combined - ecosystems on land, plus shallow coasts - makes up just 5% of the liveable space on our planet.

Instead, maybe you should be picturing somewhere dark, cold, and under hundreds of metres of water. 

The deep-sea world

"If aliens would come to planet Earth and sample the habitats here to find out what our biodiversity is like, they could conceivably have to sample 95 times before they would find a habitat that was not deep sea," says Associate Professor Kat Bolstad from Auckland University of Technology. 

This is why scientists are still finding new species of deep-sea squid. 

When Kat says deep-sea, she means the part of the ocean below the sunlight ("photic") zone, where photosynthesis can take place. But even without sunlight, there are plenty of creatures down there making their own light though bioluminescence. 

It's a very different world to our up-top, dry-air, UV-intense spaces, which makes it tricky for us to visit and study. You can lower submarines or equipment down there. But squid are alert to anything strange in their environment and tend to make themselves scarce. 

Kat does make use of such exploration methods and has even been down to depths of 1,000 metres in a bubble submarine in the Antarctic herself. But to unravel the secret lives of squid, she also relies on other avenues. Like "squid Christmas".   

'It's the most wonderful time of the year'

Every year, Kat and some of her research team travel to Wellington for "squid Christmas" - a clean out of NIWA's freezers that sometimes yields "presents" in the form of "squidsicles" - frozen squid specimens. 

It's always a time of excitement. 

"Anytime you look at samples from the deep sea, there's a reasonable chance that you will see something that no human has ever seen before," says Kat.

As well as NIWA, Kat collaborates closely with Te Papa and Auckland Museum, who also have marine collections filled with deep-sea treasures collected by research vessels on fishing surveys, biodiversity sampling, or discovery expeditions. 

Focusing on squid eyes  …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Jump onboard an alpine flight to photograph some glaciers! The annual snowline survey has been running since 1977, but today new techniques are allowing researchers to go beyond 2D photos to make 3D models of the glaciers. Claire Concannon joins the team for a long day of flying and photographing.

It's a bright blue morning in Queenstown. Summer has been and gone, and the first hints of autumn are starting to appear. Leaves turning, a sharpness in the mornings, the first overnight frosts. 

And as this shift begins, it's also time for another annual event - the end of summer snowline survey flight to monitor New Zealand's glaciers. 

How to build a glacier

A glacier forms when snow builds up over time, turns to ice and then begins to flow downwards under the pressure of its own weight. For this to happen, you need snow accumulating.  

The snowline is an imaginary line that traces along mountain slopes and marks the lower limit of permanent snow cover. Below this line, snow and ice melt away, above it, snow sticks around. 

At the change of seasons, snow below this line from the previous winter will have melted, and if you time it right, and no new snow has fallen, you can fly a plane past a glacier and photograph the end-of-summer snowline. By repeating this each year, researchers can track changes happening to our glaciers over time.

'Trev used to run on excitement and liquorice' 

The survey began in 1977. Back then, it was designed and led by a scientist called Trevor Chinn. After completing an inventory of all New Zealand's glaciers, and coming up with a total of more than 3100, Trevor realised that it just wasn't practical to monitor every individual glacier.

Instead, he developed a list of 51 'index' glaciers that would be surveyed each year. Using aerial photographs that showed the end of summer snowline height, they would be able to estimate ice volumes of the glaciers year-on-year - and keep an eye on changes. 

Though the survey baton was passed on to Dr Drew Lorrey of NIWA in 2009, Chinn continued to go on the annual flights until his passing in 2018. As a nod to him, there's still a bag of liquorice opened and passed around on each flight.

"Trev used to run on excitement and liquorice," says Lorrey . "There's a really rich legacy that we've got to do justice to, in terms of carrying on, but also making sure that the science grows and that it actually is applied with a purpose." …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

A new six-part video series highlights the state of our oceans, and efforts from researchers, Māori and other partners to develop sustainable solutions.

Check out this new series of short video documentaries, Turning The Tide.

Across six episodes, Turning The Tide shows what's happening beneath the ocean surface, and highlights mahi across the motu to restore marine ecosystems.

We hear firsthand from researchers, iwi, hapū, community leaders and others who are coming together to devise sustainable solutions for the sea, and ensure healthy and resilient oceans for generations to come.

From kina barrens to restoring mussel beds to engaging rangatahi, Turning The Tide traverses a raft of fascinating marine stories that will take you deeper into our oceans.

Watch Turning The Tide on the RNZ website, RNZ Facebook page, or the RNZ YouTube channel.

Turning The Tide was made by Tauihu Media and funded by the Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Māori and Pacific peoples are three to six times more likely to develop stomach cancer than New Zealanders with European ancestry. Claire Concannon visits a research team taking aim at this disparity.

Dr Tom Mules wears two hats. He's a researcher at the Malaghan Institute for Medical Research, but he's also a gastroenterologist at Hutt Valley hospital. It's there that he meets patients suffering from stomach cancer. 

"It's a horrible disease. A large number of people are diagnosed when the treatment options are limited, when it's too late for surgery," he says.

This is what has motivated him to take on his latest research challenge - one that he hopes will reduce stomach cancer rates and disparities in Aotearoa.  

What's a bacterium got to do with stomach cancer? 

Worldwide, stomach cancer was responsible for more than 660,000 deaths in 2022. In Aotearoa New Zealand it’s the eighth leading cause of cancer death for men. But when you look into the data, the picture gets more complicated. Māori and Pacific peoples are three to six times more likely to develop stomach cancer, and chances of survival are worse.

There are some well-established risk factors for stomach cancer, and one of these is infection with the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori). Many people around the world are infected with H. pylori, between 40–50% of the global population, and a lot of people are asymptomatic. However, in some people H. pylori can cause inflammation of the stomach lining, and, if left untreated, this can lead to tissue damage, ulcers, and eventually, for some people, stomach cancer.

As Tom explains, we don’t have up-to-date data on the rates of infection of H. pylori in New Zealand, the best information we have comes from a small South Auckland study from over a decade ago.

Looking at just shy of 600 people, the researchers found that around 30% of Māori and Pasifika had H. pylori infection, while for New Zealand Europeans it was just under 8%.

A team at the University of Otago is currently running a study to find out how common H. pylori is in New Zealand, so that we have better numbers. 

The rise of resistance …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Aotearoa is a country plagued by pests, but conservationists are hoping advances in drone technology could turn the tables. Producer William Ray looks at how drones are being trialled in controlling everything from microscopic diseases to elusive wallabies, and wilding pine trees.

A ghostly grey image appears on the laptop screen. "You see these deer?" asks Jordan Munn, pointing at a corner off the screen where a pair of animals are highlighted in bright white.

"I have directed a hunter to these deer. He's actually just shot this one, this deer to the right, and it's about to fall over," he says. 

The brilliant silhouette of the first deer tumbles to the ground, the second follows a few moments afterwards. 

Hunting with heat

Jordan is professional hunter and owns a company called Trap and Trigger based in Upper Hutt. The company has contracts with several regional councils for eliminating everything from deer to wallabies to wilding pines

And Jordan says there's a new technology revolutionising the industry - small commercially available UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), or as they are more often called: drones. 

"We're becoming more and more reliant on them," Jordan says. "It's amazing how the pest control industry has reshaped in the last decade. Ten years ago,  basically non-existent."

When mounted on a drone, the thermal vision of an infrared camera makes warm-blooded deer, wallabies and other mammalian pest species stick out like a sore thumb - even when the animal is mostly obscured by scrub. 

A decade ago, Jordan says, even a thermal imaging camera or scope was beyond the budget of most commercial hunters. But costs have come down radically over the past decades, and they are still dropping. 

"Within a few years, every contractor will have a thermal handheld camera and a thermal scope and a thermal drone. And if you don't have one of those or all of those, you're lagging behind," Jordan says.

It all seems very science fiction, and Jordan speculates it could be possible to use drone technology to remove the hunter from the equation entirely. 

"We haven't yet got guns on them," Jordan says. "But if we could legally use a firearm from a drone safely.... It would work. It would work very well. But there will be a few issues, social issues and legal issues to get to that point."

While weaponised drones aren't likely to arrive in New Zealand any time soon, Otago Regional Council is already experimenting with fully autonomous drones for a different type of pest.

Tree terminators…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Caves created by rivers of lava underlie New Zealand's biggest city. A new research project is documenting Auckland's lava caves, hoping to protect this hidden geological heritage and understand what future eruptions might have in store.

Known for its iconic maunga like Rangitoto and Maungawhau Mt Eden, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland is a city built on an active volcanic field that has erupted at least 53 times.

But beneath streets, houses and parks, there are other - hidden - remnants of the city's fiery past: hundreds of lava caves.

The backyard cave

Lava caves form when hot flowing lava meets air and crusts over, creating a tunnel. Eventually the lava drains away, leaving behind a cavity. 

Formed as far back as 200,000 years ago and as recently as 550 years ago (when Rangitoto erupted), lava caves in Auckland range from small cracks to lengthy tunnels. The longest, located in Wiri, stretches to 290 metres.

The lava cave in Sean Jacob's Mt Eden backyard is about 100 metres long. "For something that's so quiet and so peaceful when you're down here, it was sort of created by so much violence," he says. 

The Jacob family bought the property in 2008 - in part so the cave would be protected, unlike many others across the city which have been destroyed or infilled with concrete in years gone by.

The speleologist

Peter Crossley is perhaps the only person who went inside some of those caves that no longer exist. A speleologist, Peter has spent 50 years documenting Auckland's lava caves. 

"Some people would say that they're muddy, grotty, dark, infested with rats and all the rest of it. But when you look at it, you realise: it's a tunnel which has been filled with lava, almost yellow in heat, that could frazzle you in a microsecond," he says.

Over the decades, Peter has seen surveying methods advance from compasses to state-of-the-art 3D scanning, giving scientists unprecedented detail and valuable insights into past eruptions.

Now he's passed on his knowledge of 180 lava caves to a new research effort.

A new lava cave every month

Jaxon Ingold, a master's student at the University of Auckland, is collating everything we know about Auckland's lava caves - drawing on Peter's records, historical sources, and mātauranga Māori - so this geological heritage can be better protected and respected.

"What I'm currently working on is: is it possible to predict where as-yet undiscovered lava caves may be located? So that we can be more careful in those areas," says Jaxon. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

A deadly frog fungus has decimated frog populations around the world, but frog biodiversity hotspot Papua New Guinea remains untouched - for now. In this episode of ABC podcast Pacific Scientific, James Purtill discovers the amphibian treasures of the world's largest tropical island, and what conservationists are doing to protect them.

Frog populations around the world have been decimated by a deadly fungus. But one place that has remained unaffected - so far - is Papua New Guinea.

It's home to the world's most diverse array of tropical frogs, including many species unknown to science. Conservationists are racing to safeguard these amphibian treasures before the fungus inevitably reaches Papua New Guinea.

The frog-killing fungus

The deadly fungal pathogen, called chytrid fungus, has swept around the world in recent years, causing mass mortality in some frog species and populations.

Chytrid fungus has been detected in New Zealand in both introduced and native frogs. It might be one factor behind the decline of the endangered Archey's frog, but its impact here is still not well understood.

When the worldwide chytrid epidemic began to accelerate in 2015, Yolarnie Amepou from the Piku Biodiversity Network in Papua New Guinea joined a search for the fungus. No evidence of chytrid was found, but scientists believe it's just a matter of time before the pathogen arrives on the world's largest tropical island.

A frog paradise

Papua New Guinea is home to rare and unique species, with many still unknown to science. In this episode from the ABC podcast Pacific Scientific, reporter James Purtill joins Yolarnie and her friend Heather for a frog hunt in the jungle near the capital city, Port Moresby.

James also checks out a captive frog facility where conservationists are raising an insurance population for if - or when - chytrid fungus hits.

Pacific Scientific is a podcast series covering science and scientists from across the Pacific. It is a co-production between ABC Science and Radio Australia. This episode was reported by James Purtill and produced by Tamara Cranswick.

James spoke to Yolarnie Amepou, director of the Piku Biodiversity Network, and Ryan Reuma, wildlife officer at the Port Moresby Nature Park.

The series producer is Jordan Fennell and executive producer is Will Ockenden. Jonathan Webb is the ABC science editor.…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

This week, Phil Vine dives into the science of climate attribution. How much is climate change affecting extreme weather events? And how can this new science prepare us for the future?

For a long time when asked this question, climate scientists simply shook their heads.

They had been telling people that global warming was making many storms, floods, and weather events worse - but when asked: "by how much?" - they didn't have an answer.

Then one day Oxford University physics professor, Myles Allen, experienced one of those extreme weather events.

As the River Thames flooded and threatened to pour water through his kitchen door, on the radio the Met Office was saying it was impossible to accurately link the event with climate change. He said to himself: "we need to do better than that".

Famously, rather than search out sandbags to keep the floodwaters at bay, he sat down and wrote a journal article - making that connection between global warming and specific weather events.

And a branch of science was born: extreme event attribution studies, or climate attribution for short.

In Aotearoa, there's a whole gang of scientists from different institutions carrying out world-leading research in this new field.

2023: the year of storms

Few in the upper North Island will forget the beginning of 2023.

The Auckland Anniversary Floods arrived at the end of January. Four people dead. Seven thousand homes damaged.

Less than two weeks later came Cyclone Gabrielle. Eleven people killed. A staggering 850,000 landslides.

After Cyclone Gabrielle, Dr Luke Harrington from the University of Waikato and an international team from the World Weather Attribution project worked round the clock on rainfall data and climate models.

They were endeavouring to find out if, and how, climate change had affected the devastating tropical cyclone.

And they broke with scientific tradition. Rather than wait and publish a paper in a year's time, they sought to get a report out while Cyclone Gabrielle was still in the news.

"If it's 12 to 18 months after the event happened, the public doesn't really care," says Luke.

The project team worked out that 10-15 per cent more rain fell because of global warming.

"It demonstrates that climate change isn't a future problem. It is not something that you are going to see play out in 50 years' time, it's already playing out now," Luke says.

The cost of climate damage …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Could the answer to one of our most pressing health needs be hiding in Aotearoa's bush? On Our Changing World this week, Liz Garton heads out on a foray to discover some of our fungal gems, and she finds out what we're doing to uncover their potential antibiotic properties.

Could the answer to the global problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria be in our backyard?

It's a question being given serious time and consideration by Dr Siouxsie Wiles and Dr Bevan Weir, with help from fungi enthusiasts around Aotearoa.

The problem

The World Health Organization describes antimicrobial resistance as one of the top global public health threats, responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths in 2019.

"Life is always fighting, so bacteria will find a way to fight against antibiotics," says Dr Bevan Weir, head of Mycology and Bacteriology Systematics Research at Manaaki Whenua / Landcare Research. "They'll evolve chemistry to cut the molecule and render it inactive or other forms of resistance - they can change their cell walls and pump out the antibiotic more."

"They're always finding a way to evolve around antibiotics, so we do need to find more," he says.

The foray

On a cool but sunny autumn morning in May 2023, Liz Garton joined The Fungal Network of New Zealand's annual foray at Maungatautari Sanctuary Mountain. The 2024 fungal foray is taking place now, from 12-18 May in Havelock.

Each year the foray is held in autumn when the fungi fruits, and it can be spotted.

Each fungus begins as a miniscule spore. From that grows the mycelium, a network of fungal strands, like string, and from those you get the fruiting body. The fruiting body is the bit we see sprouting out of the ground, or whatever the organism is growing on - what we call a mushroom.

Bevan says one of the main reasons for the foray is to take samples for the national culture collection (which he curates) and to try identify and describe what is found.

"That's one of the big questions we don't know; what fungi is native and what are not," he says. "We have probably only described or identified about a third of the fungal biodiversity in New Zealand."

With that unidentified diversity comes diversity of chemistry too. A fungus growing on a piece of wood needs to defend itself and compete with bacteria.

"So it will be producing an antibacterial to kill that bacteria and we might be able to discover what that is and use it for us in a medical context," says Bevan.

The (possible) solution

This brings us to the work Bevan is doing with microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles at the University of Auckland…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details