One of the fun things about working in an ecology department at a university is being surrounded by people who are *really, really good* at finding interesting critters.

On Thursday we took our annual first year ecology course field trip to Ōtamahua/Quail Island. That's a reserve in the middle of Lyttelton Harbour, where the pest mammals (except mice) have been removed and lots of trees have been planted. It was a great day.

Here's entomology Masters student George Gibbs, a genius at finding insects, with one of a pair of mating stick insects that he found.

And, here's Jennifer Gillette, our talented herpetologist, with two native geckos she found. (Don't pick up geckos. Jennifer has training and a permit from the Department of Conservation to handle these.)

#LincolnUniversityNZ #nature #insects #geckos #NZ #CanterburyNZ #QuailIsland #Ōtamahua

NEWS FLASH: We have CLAMS living on campus!

As part of last week's Sustainability Week at #LincolnUniversityNZ, our freshwater ecology tutor Elysia Harcombe did some kick sampling along a farm ditch. Yes, she found clams!

It's the first record on #iNaturalist of clams on campus, or anywhere in Lincoln (and we've been kick sampling in the Liffey Stream through Lincoln for several years in my biodiversity class).

There are records of some clams living in the Yarrs Lagoon wetland reserve to the south of campus, but that's about 3 km to the south (which is downstream and is not connected to campus).

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/316195607

#clam #FreshwaterEcology #nz

[Edit: “Sustainability Week”, not “Sustainability Weed”, which would be a bad thing. ]

This week is Sustainability Week at #LincolnUniversityNZ. Here’s the student magazine with all the details. I’m looking forward to today’s tree planting, 11–1, at the site of the university’s old Burns Building.

Burns was damaged in the earthquakes and demolished and a new replacement science building, Waimarie, has been built nearby. In the footprint of the old Burns building the university is planting a native forest of ecosourced local Canterbury Plains forest plants, mostly sourced from the Department of Conservation’s Motukarara nursery. It’s going to be fun to watch the baby forest grow!

Also part of Sustainability Week is the first “Great LU BioBlitz” running all week on campus using #iNaturalist. It will be interesting to see how many more species we can add to the campus’s already extensive species tally.

#SustainabilityWeek #Restoration #TreePlanting #nz

The other ecology seminar we had this week at #LincolnUniversityNZ was on the state of New Zealand's lakes, by Professor Susie Wood. Susie has spent her career working on projects understanding and monitoring the health of NZ's lakes. She took us through some of the ground-breaking recent work using eDNA from sediment cores on lake floors.

The eDNA, and other data, have been used to reconstruct the environments in lakes, and on the land by lakes, for the past 14,000 years. That means that we know in a lot of detail what happened when Polynesian and then European settlers colonised NZ.

Her team's data show fish extinctions and rise of algae as lakes turn eutrophic. They even show the extinction of the native birds in the nearby lands. Worryingly, before English settlement, our lakes were resilient to major storms and bounced back quickly to pre-storm states. Now most lowland lakes are too broken to be resilient to storms.

The state of NZ's lakes is pretty grim. None of the hundreds of lakes in the dataset are getting better in the metrics. We are halting water quality decline in a few lakes, but in none is biodiversity recovering.

Lakes hold on to the legacy of land use changes for hundreds of years, like all the extra nutrients now stored in their sediments. Susie concluded that “we’re in for a three thousand year journey to restore our lakes.”

#nz #BiodiversityCrisis #conservation #lakes #ecology #biodiversity

We had a couple of interesting ecology and conservation seminars this week at #LincolnUniversityNZ. The first, on Monday, was by Lou Sanson, ex-Director General of the NZ Department of Conservation.

Lou is now involved in the 30x30 initiative to protect 30% of Earth's land area and 30% of its marine area. 30x30 is an international effort, driven by 122 of the world's countries, which have all signed up to be part of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People.

Lou gave a tour of some of the amazing projects happening around the world to protect the planet's wild places, as part of 30x30.

Is New Zealand part of this? No, of course not. We'd need a change of government for NZ to show leadership on conservation and environmental issues.

We do already have 30% of our land in reserves. Almost all of that is in the highest and wettest parts of the country, where English settlers couldn't farm. NZ hasn’t made a national park or a world heritage area in 25 years, and many of our reserves are struggling under pressure from pests and weeds. We have only 2% of our oceans protected.

We can do a lot better. As Lou concluded, “We’re seen as a world leader but we're not acting as a world leader at the moment.”

https://hacfornatureandpeople.org/

https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/high-ambition-coalition-for-nature-and-people/

#nz #conservation #30x30 #nzpol #BiodiversityCrisis

We just brought in six audio recorders from across campus at #LincolnUniversityNZ, which students had laid out as part of our long-term monitoring of campus birds.

To our surprise, and annoyance, some pesky varmint has done its best to gnaw right through one of them. I've not seen anything like it before, and we've had these units left out in all sorts of wild places.

Either it's one very hungry rat, or a rat that particularly likes the taste of plastic. Maybe if we can catch it and breed it, there's a potential for plastic recycling rat farms.

#rats #nz #AudioRecorder #ecology #plastic

An undergraduate student here at #LincolnUniversityNZ, Shuizetinglan, was interested in exploring tide pools so we suggested he visit Inainatu/Pile Bay in Lyttelton Harbour. It has an extensive rocky platform that's exposed at low tide where various intertidal creatures can be found.

Shuizetinglan visited there on the weekend and found several interesting things, like the 5th observation on #iNaturalist from Banks Peninsula of a dwarf brittle seastar, the 1st observation on iNaturalist from Banks Peninsula of a Jewel Anemone, and this, the 1st observation on iNaturalist from Banks Peninsula of a sea spider.

When it comes to local intertidal biodiversity, there's a lot still to document.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/306719391

#marine #intertidal #tidepool #nz #Christchurch #BanksPeninsula #iNaturalistNZ #nature

It's always a treat to find earthstars and today was the first time I'd found some on the campus of #LincolnUniversityNZ where I work.

They come out of the ground like little brown flowers and their central balls puff out spores when the rain hits them. And, then, they're gone again.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/306208265

#fungi #Geastrum #nz #Lincoln

A female korimako (NZ bellbird) has been spotted at #LincolnUniversityNZ! These photos were taken on our campus on Tuesday by student William Harland. I checked on #iNaturalistNZ and, of the 153 korimako observations from Lincoln town and surrounds, this is the only the second female bird seen in Lincoln, and the first on the university campus. The other bird was seen in 2023.

All the korimako I see on campus, and all the others that have been photographed closely enough to tell on iNat, have all been males. They tend to spread out from the Port Hills outside of breeding season, and disappear from Lincoln in the Spring and Summer and head back to the hills.

If females are now down here exploring, there's a chance they'll pair up with males and breed in Lincoln, which would be exciting.

(Female korimako have the elegant pale cheek stripe that males lack.)

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/304136212

#birds #nz #Lincoln #iNaturalist

Frogs! So many frogs!

Our field ecology course at #LincolnUniversityNZ was up in the Southern Alps mountains of Boyle, North Canterbury, NZ, this weekend. Despite the winter cold, hundreds of whistling frogs were noisily calling at night from a nearby pond. We went to check them out on a night walk.

These are an Australian frog species, Litoria ewingii, introduced on purpose to NZ 1875. I just read on Wikipedia that they're known to be able to survive freezing in the winter, which will explain how they've managed to thrive in NZ's Southern Alps.

None of NZ's three native frogs remain in Canterbury (eaten out by introduced rats and mice), so having an Australian frog here isn't so bad.

Click on the iNat link to hear their chorus of calling.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/304186932

#frogs #nz #nature

Today I was teaching a lecture about environmental weeds, for our Applied Ecology and Conservation course at #LincolnUniversityNZ. I showed the class the "Environmental weeds in New Zealand" project on #iNaturalist. That was made by staff at the #DepartmentofConservation to gather observations of DOC's 386 weed species.

These are the plants that DOC has assessed as being fully naturalised wild exotics, already present in natural ecosystems, and likely to be having more than minor impacts on NZ ecosystems. iNat currently has 199,588 observations of 379 of these species.

On a whim, in class I decided to see how many of these environmental weeds were present on the university campus.

Was it 10? Maybe 20?

No, 109 species.

Like a lot of urban and rural areas in NZ, our campus is a reservoir of weeds.

https://inaturalist.nz/projects/environmental-weeds-in-new-zealand

https://inaturalist.nz/observations?place_id=67596&project_id=environmental-weeds-in-new-zealand&subview=map&verifiable=any

#nz #weeds #InvasiveSpecies #biosecurity

Here are a couple of the invertebrate finds from our three-day field trip into the mountains this weekend with our Field Ecology Methods course at #LincolnUniversityNZ

The weevil somehow ended up in the hair of student Emilie while she was walking through the Boyle beech forest. She put it in a vial and brought it back to the lodge for photographing. It's the NZ endemic weevil Eurynotia enysi and this is the 16th record on #iNaturalist and the species isn't even on GBIF.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/303365453

The springtail was found under a log in beech forest by staff member Jennifer Gillette. We were looking for giant springtails and instead found this wee cutie. @frankashwood helped us to identify it on #iNaturalistNZ as genus Platanurida, one of the Short-legged Springtails. This is the 20th observation of this genus on iNat globally (there are 2 records on GBIF).

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/303359336

So little is known about most NZ invertebrates that making useful finds like this is easy. We need more people with macro attachments for their phones out exploring NZ's mountains.

#nature #nz #insects #springtails #invertebrates

This weekend I've been up at the Boyle River Outdoor Education Centre helping to teach our field ecology methods course at #LincolnUniversityNZ.

That's our second-year undergraduate ecology course that gives students practical experience with a lot of common ecology field methods, and teaches them the background on how and when to use them.

Here's one of our students, Kate, demonstrating the difficult skill of photographing a kakaruai (South Island robin).

Some ecology methods are harder than others. 😄

#birds #nz #ecology #forest #BoyleRiverOutdoorEducationCentre

Yesterday afternoon I was at the #ChristchurchBotanicGardens, with an undergrad student at #LincolnUniversityNZ who will be interning at the garden during the next teaching semester. Luke Martin, the curator of the native section of the garden, gave us a fascinating tour behind the scenes of the garden's native nursery, seed bank, and herbarium.

A lot of work is being done at the Gardens to learn about and safeguard Aotearoa New Zealand's botanical taonga. New natural history knowledge is being figured out about Canterbury's most threatened native plants so they can be kept safe in the seed bank and glasshouses, in case some of the Department of Conservation's valiant efforts in the wild fail.

Some of Canterbury's most threatened plant species only exist in the wild in patches of a few square metres in remnant vegetation on private farmland. The work Luke and colleagues are doing may prove exceptionally important for the survival of some of these species.

There's a lot more to the botanic gardens than a place to see pretty flowers.

#Christchurch #NZ #botany #ChristchurchBotanicGardens #BotanicGarden

We don't teach an art degree at #LincolnUniversityNZ, Te Whare Wānaka o Aoraki, but we're filled with art. We're a smaller university that specialises on land management (agriculture, landscape architecture, environmental policy and planning, conservation and ecology, etc.). Still, one of the nice things about working here is that art is everywhere.

Since the 1970s, we've built up a significant collection of over 300 artworks by artists from Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world. They're on display in classrooms and hallways and as sculptures in the gardens.

Just outside my office is this terrific sculpture of tunariki (baby eels) by Bing Dawe.

https://ltl.lincoln.ac.nz/tools-and-databases/collections/art-collection/

#university #nz #art #sculpture #eels

I used this paper as one of the options this year in the final assessment in my 200-level Biological Diversity undergraduate science class at #LincolnUniversityNZ. I've spent most of today reading students' thoughts on this paper and its implications for NZ conservation. It's been an interesting day.

@aligorith How far away is the nearest adult female kahikatea? The podocarps get moved above by birds but almost all seedlings are within 100 m from their parents.

This all reminds me of Brendan Doody’s Master’s thesis at #LincolnUniversityNZ over 15 years ago now, where he looked at the neighbourhood around Riccarton Bush in Christchurch. Riccarton Bush is an old growth kahikatea fragment. In general, the local residents Brendan surveyed were strongly supportive of the bush but hardly any (2%) could identify kahikatea seedlings and people were weeding them out from their gardens.

https://wildcounts.org/blog/2014/01/15/A-kahikatea-in-the-head-is-worth-two-in-the-bush/

@TizaneNZ Bingo. Yes, it’s weird. Two of the flowering cherries on the campus of #LincolnUniversityNZ have just started flowering too.

It’s not every week that #RNZ has a story about spider genitalia. This is such a week. Kate Curtis, a current PhD student at #LincolnUniversityNZ, has been hard at work figuring out all of the jumping spiders we have in Aotearoa-NZ. There’s estimated to be about 200 (most of them) that need scientific names. Figuring out which is which requires careful microscope work looking at spider genitalia. Along the way Kate’s finding new species.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/560268/native-jumping-spider-found-in-restored-rotorua-forest

#nz #nature #spiders #Salticidae

Today my Biological Diversity class at #LincolnUniversityNZ toured the Allan Herbarium at #ManaakiWhenua. It is NZ's largest pressed plant collection, a treasure trove of hundreds of thousands of botanical marvels.

Botanist Sue Gibb talked about how the herbarium works and showed us some amazing plants, including type specimens used to describe new species, extinct plants and first collections of new weeds, and some of the plants collected on Captain Cook's voyages.

#botany #nz #herbarium