No one owns water in New Zealand, have a great swim!
100% pure disappointment
Swimmable
I had a lot of fun illustrating this comic which explains what swimmable means.
Trojans
I have been fascinated with biological population control methods ever since I heard about the Sterile Insect Technique being used to control mosquitoes and limit the spread of the Zika virus. The Tojan Female Technique (TFT) is the latest angle on this and it seems like magic. I read The Trojan female technique: a novel, effective and humane approach for pest population control (2013) but I am not good enough at math to understand it. How can this work? Surely biology is smart enough to not be unbalanced so easily? I had to understand it better – so I built a simulator.
Being a trapper I already knew a fair bit about rats so I knew roughly how much they had to move around and interact. Building in logic on lifespan, gestation, litter size and range was fun but the population kept clumping together around a core of less mobile females.
My first breakthrough came when I evenly distributed (invisible) food across the screen, I then also used food to control litter size and bingo I had a stable population model. I did not even need to introduce seasons, the population surged and wained very naturally.
However I was disappointed when I started introducing Trojans. I would add a bunch and wait and they never overtook the original population. I was sure something was wrong with my model but then I tried doing regular releases (like they do in the aforementioned paper). It worked! I still don’t really understand it, I thought there would be a tipping point or something but the whole thing is very steady, and fast! In most cases I did not need to simulate a 1080 drop to exterminate the population in less than 10 years – amazing.
There seems to be a sweet spot with about 1-5 releases every 30-90 days in a population of 200 rats. That’s about 100 females added which is 50% of the initial population. Luckily they are very cheap to make.
I could make it more realistic by:
- Simulating a 1080 drop which reduces the initial population to 5%
- Reducing home ranges for females and immatures
- Increasing range of males during breeding season
- Getting more data on seasonal variations in range and litter size
- Create a cost per release and a cost per rat released
- Other stuff from reading about rat behaviour
- Stop it from freezing (about 6% of simulations freeze for some reason)
However the simulation has proven the concept to me and I am more excited about the technique than ever before. You can play with it here shaunlee.co.nz/trojans
Pure New Zealand
I love James Cameron’s 2010 TED talk which has been used in the latest 100% Pure New Zealand campaign.
Like Cameron, I too grew up reading and drawing science fiction and exploring nature. This year my ‘journey of discovery’ took me deep into the Waitakeres for my own Avatar experience.
There, in the moonlight, I crouched in the middle of a small stream prodding and splashing away like a child. Like Jake Sully I was enchanted with tiny animals that (unlike glowworms who glow for hours) release a bright burst of bioluminescence. The limpets I was teasing are called Latia and they release bioluminescent slime as a defensive mechanism.
You won’t find these alien limpets anywhere else in the world and you also will no longer find them in most New Zealand streams. They need clean water, and we have filled our lakes and rivers with too much sediment for them to survive. Our waterways are far from 100% pure. Most of the rivers that are pristine are high in the South Island where it is too cold for Latia to survive.
Our government wants to treat our streams and rivers like drains. The legislation they have proposed sets extremely low standards for our waterways. I agree with the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment – sediment is one of the three big issues affecting our waterways. Yet our Government has not included sediment as an attribute in the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, and we can’t manage that which we do not measure.
In the 100% Pure ad James Cameron tells us that ‘curiosity is the most powerful thing we own’. My curiosity has changed the way I see the New Zealand environment. It has altered my enjoyment of the New Zealand wilderness. Where before I just saw bush, now see invasive plants. Having heard the morning chorus in our wildlife sanctuaries I am let down by our silent mainland forests.
So a few years ago I started a personal project about the positive stuff – the things that make New Zealand unique. MostNZ.com is a website showcasing what we can celebrate about New Zealand, how to experience those things and most importantly how to keep them. It’s a lot more honest than the 100% campaign but it’s still advertises New Zealand.
We can grow tourism and the economy by growing, protecting and restoring our wilderness. But to do it we need more, James Cameron; more curiosity, more imagination, more vision.
Let’s at least try for 50% pure. Let’s focus on the quality not the quantity of our exports. Let’s start doing restoration at an industrial scale and let’s really invest in our scientists who dream of a predator free New Zealand.
Like the narrative arc of James Cameron’s blockbusters we have tasks to master, battles to win and transformations to witness. The New Zealand story must have our unique environment at its heart.
James Cameron ends his Ted Talk with ‘‘No important endeavour that required innovation was done without risk.” – “Failure is an option, but fear is not.”
Most New Zealand video
A video showcasing the highlights from mostnz.com. Most New Zealand is a website I made about what makes New Zealand so special and why we should care.
The Story of the Hauraki Gulf
The Hauraki Gulf is a special place with a tragic story, but the tide is turning.
Raewyn Peart is blogging about her upcoming book on haurakigulfstory.com I thought these posts were particularly insightful.
MOST New Zealand
I have been working on this project for the last few years.
It has been a lot of fun to make, the video work was challenging but also the most rewarding. There are 20 pages with an additional 11 fun facts, but there are so many more I want to add. Most of them involve going to remote locations and sitting quietly for a long time, so I have done the easier ones first. If the site proves popular I will add more pages. I wish it did not have ads but if the site makes money then I can easier justify working on it more.
My hope is that New Zealanders who experience the site better understand how special the New Zealand environment is and thereby value it more. If it proves popular the site may increase domestic and international tourism to wildlife destinations. I think this would be a good thing because growing our economy via tourism means better protection and investment in our natural assets. Where as growing our economy via primary industries means more industrial scale environmental degradation.
I think my favourite fact is probably the one with the worst video New Zealand has the most nosy bird was so much fun to shoot. I spent a few nights wondering around looking for kiwi after helping with the kiwi monitoring count at Tawharanui regional park. I had never before seen kiwi in the wild and given its slow metabolism and the cold night I was expecting a quiet, slow and shy bird. But were so fast – hooting off through the bush if I surprised them and so noisy – snorting away like pigs! I hope I get to spend lots more time in the wilderness with these birds and all the other creatures I captured on camera.
Agency capture
In New Zealand there are thousands of people who’s job it is to look out for nature. They start their career’s with a love for nature but then commercial priorities begin to disproportionately influence their decisions.
I think it starts of small, New Zealanders are very polite and do not like to “rock the boat”. Employees who don’t question the status quo are more likely to do well in a regulatory agency subject to the whim of government budgets. It’s also just easier to do nothing.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”
– Edmund Burke.
The existing agency culture slowly overcomes the individual, first the words they use, then full blown cognitive dissonance. On the way I bet there are conscious compromises, a given regulator is likely to hear a lot more from industry they they will from environmental groups, they are also far more likely to get a well paid job in industry than an environmental group.
It’s a big problem, it’s built into the system and I do not know how to change it. However when a whistle blower does call our attention to it we need to act swiftly and harshly to remind regulators that they are being watched and that they have a real job to stand up for nature.
This week the Operation Achilles report leaked from the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) clearly describes how endangered Hector’s dolphins were killed by commercial fishers in 2012. The deaths were not included in the Department of Conservations reports which are critical in the ongoing management of this species. This is unforgivable especially now that we are down to less the 50 Maui dolphins (a subspecies with similar threats). Another independent study suggests that New Zealand’s total fisheries catch since 1950 is 2.7 times higher than officially reported!
MPI are failing not just to regulate but even to report on the industry. They are no longer able to manage the fisheries with the interests of all New Zealanders. Now marine experts are calling for the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) to be stripped of its responsibility for monitoring commercial fishing. I agree – the current system is not salvable, we need a new organisation with the right culture to do this job.
Threatened Species
I did some research for an upcoming side project to see how New Zealand compares to other countries in terms of threatened species. When I compared NZ to the rest of the world using the IUCN Red List (2013) we look ok, but things look much worse when we factor in our relatively small land mass. However poor countries like Ecuador are doing much worse than us, probably because the human/environment conflict is so high. However if we just look at OECD counties the same size as New Zealand or larger New Zealand has the most threatened species of birds per KM2
Here is the ranking:
- New Zealand
- Japan
- Chile
- Turkmenistan
- Italy
- Mexico
- Poland
- Spain
- Turkey
- Germany
- Finland
- United Kingdom
- France
- Norway
- Sweden
- United States
- Australia
- Canada
And the raw data