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Nukuwaiata / Inner Chetwode Island – 1936 and 2011 – In the footsteps of Edgar Stead (Part 2)

18 January 2011 – 3.06pm

As part of a project to publish the wildlife diaries of Edgar Stead (see blog of 15 December 2010), I am revisiting some of the islands that Stead camped on during the period 1929-1947. The main focus is describing how the ecology of the islands has changed since Stead’s time. The visits also provide an opportunity to take photographs to illustrate the diaries.

1. Nukuwaiata (Inner Chetwode Island), with the outer Marlborough Sounds in the distance.

Nukuwaiata (Inner Chetwode Island), with the outer Marlborough Sounds in the distance. Photograph reproduced courtesy of Colin Miskelly.

Stead camped on Nukuwaiata, at the outer entrance to Pelorus Sound, with his wife and son, and companion Major Robert Wilson for 10 days in January 1936. Stead and Wilson had also previously visited in 1926.

2. The first and second forest geckos recorded from Nukuwaiata, January 2011

The first and second forest geckos recorded from Nukuwaiata, January 2011. Reproduced courtesy of Colin Miskelly

We stayed on Nukuwaiata Nature Reserve (with permission from the Department of Conservation) for two nights in January 2011, and noticed some dramatic changes since my previous visit in April 1993. Pacific rats and weka (both introduced to the island) were eradicated by DOC later in 1993, allowing remnant lizard populations to recover. Stead noted “We saw no lizzards of any sort” in 1936, whereas we saw over 30 lizards of four species, including the first records of forest geckos from the island.

A young falcon checks out the photographer, January 2011. Reproduced courtesy of Colin Miskelly

Another dramatic change was that the 242 ha island’s bird population had recovered sufficiently to support a top predator. New Zealand falcons had recolonised, and a pair had successfully raised three young to the flying stage. These were curious about the new intruders on their domain, and occasionally broke off from their dogfights to check us out.

Camp robin, January 2011. Reproduced courtesy of Colin Miskelly.

One thing that had not changed was the tameness of the South Island robins. Stead wrote “Our most constant visitor is a cock bird…He sits on our coats and hats, on the billies or frypan, and even on the crossbar of the fireplace when the fire is on”.

Left: Edgar Stead, Dot Stead and Roland Stead, possibly on Nukuwaiata in 1936 (when Roland was 13 years old). Right: Colin Miskelly, Kate McAlpine and Kieran Miskelly (age 13) on Nukuwaiata in 2011. Right: Colin Miskelly, Kate McAlpine and Kieran Miskelly (age 13) on Nukuwaiata in 2011. Photo: Liam Miskelly.

Left: Edgar Stead, Dot Stead and Roland Stead, possibly on Nukuwaiata in 1936 (when Roland was 13 years old). Photo: Edgar Stead. Macmillan collection, 2001.59.381, Canterbury Museum. Permission of Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand must be obtained before any re-use of this image. Right: Colin Miskelly, Kate McAlpine and Kieran Miskelly (age 13) on Nukuwaiata in 2011. Photo: Liam Miskelly.

By Colin Miskelly, Curator Terrestrial Vertebrates

By Colin Miskelly | Posted in Biodiversity, Birds, Field trips, Reptiles | Also tagged edgar stead, nukuwaiata, pelorus sound, wildlife | Comments (9)

The toromiro tree: Kowhai’s remarkable cousin from Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

29 November 2010 – 11.56am

Close-up of the flowers of Sophora toromiro growing at the National Botanic Gardens in Viña del Mar, Chile. Photo © Heidi M. Meudt.

Does the plant in the above photo look familiar? That’s probably because the tree in the photo is in the same genus—Sophora—as the kowhai. There are about 45 species of Sophora worldwide, including the toromiro tree from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) shown above. There are eight different species of Sophora in New Zealand, several examples of which can be seen in Te Papa’s Collections Online.

What is so special about the toromiro tree? Toromiro is an endemic plant species from Rapa Nui that has been extinct in the wild for over 30 years.

The species was formally described as Sophora toromiro in a 1921 book about the botany of Rapa Nui . An interesting account of the history and taxonomy of the toromiro has been published previously.

Last week, an article in the Chilean newspaper La Tercera highlighted the exciting recent progress of a team of scientists from Universidad Católica in Chile who are working toward re-establishment of the toromiro tree on Rapa Nui.

The team of Chilean scientists, led by Patricio Arce, have managed to propagate 700 individual plants so far. This is a big accomplishment. Growing these plants is especially tricky because they need a specialized fungus growing in their root system in order to survive.

Importantly, the use of genetic techniques has confirmed that the original plants used to vegetatively propagate these individuals are Sophora toromiro (and not some other closely-related species). By next year, the scientists hope to have about 5000 toromiro individuals ready to be relocated to Rapa Nui.

I saw my first toromiro tree at Rapa Nui’s small botanic garden while visiting the island with my family in 2007.

Sophora toromiro in the botanic garden on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), 2007. Note the circular stone wall surrounding the plant. Similar stone-walled garden enclosures, or manavai, were once agriculturally important on Rapa Nui. Photo © Mauricio A. López L.

This individual is one of few re-established individuals currently alive on the island, as previous attempts to restore larger populations there have so far proven unsuccessful.

On a more recent trip to Chile this year, I was excited to find several individuals of Sophora toromiro growing in a special garden at the National Botanic Gardens at Viña del Mar.

Special toromiro garden at Chile’s National Botanic Gardens in Viña del Mar. Photo © Heidi M. Meudt.

Other botanic gardens around the world are also growing toromiro as part of an international conservation effort to help keep it alive. For example, check out the efforts of the Royal Botanic Garden at Melbourne and watch a short video on toromiro conservation work at Kew Gardens in England.

One of the Sophora toromiro individuals at Chile’s National Botanic Garden, Viña del Mar. Photo © Heidi M. Meudt.

Although it is hard to imagine based on the size of the plants in these photos, toromiro trees were once big enough that their wood was prized by Rapa Nui carvers. I checked Te Papa’s Collections Online and discovered that Te Papa has several Rapa Nui wood carvings in its collection, one of which is shown below.

Moai kavakava (human figure), 1800s, Maker unknown, Easter Island. Oldman Collection. Gift of the New Zealand Government, 1992. Te Papa

Was this beautiful statuette made using toromiro wood? In addition to toromiro, a few other tree species are found on Rapa Nui, at least one of which may also be used for carving. Comparative wood anatomy techniques have been used to show that certain carved wooden tablets from Rapa Nui were made from the wood of the mako‘i tree (Thespesia populnea). Such specialised methods would be required to accurately identify the type of wood that was used in the figure shown here.

Due to the cultural, historical and biological significance of the toromiro to the people of Rapa Nui and the rest of the world, I sincerely hope that the efforts of international and Chilean researchers to re-establish the toromiro on its native island are successful.

By Heidi Meudt | Posted in Plants | Also tagged Chile, Easter Island, kowhai, Plants, Rapa Nui, Sophora, toromiro, wood carving | Comments (1)

Phar Lap’s Trip to Melbourne – A Conservation Perspective

7 September 2010 – 4.49pm

Phar Lap while on display at Te Papa (c)Kate Whitley 2010

As many of you know, Phar Lap is on his way back to Melbourne for the 150th anniversary of the Melbourne Cup to take place later this year.

Phar Lap was foaled on 4 October 1926 in Seadown, near Timaru on the South Island of New Zealand. Bought by David J. Davis and trained by Harry Telford, a Sydney trainer, Phar Lap was ultimately trained to race in Australia. He died while in America on 5 April 1932.

Upon his death, Phar Lap’s remains were divided up between Canberra, Melbourne and New Zealand and his skeletal remains have lived on display at Te Papa since they were articulated in 1938 by Charles Lindsay and E.H. Gibson.

Newspaper article published in August of 1938 regarding the original articulation of Phar Lap's skeleton

On 30 July 2010 he was disassembled by Conservator, Robert Clendon, and Collection Manager Gillian Stone, who will also courier the skeleton to Melbourne in September 2010. As a visiting intern working with Robert, I was given the opportunity to help in his dismantling, condition assessment and treatment prior to being sent to Melbourne.

Removal of the skull was the first step in the dissassembly of the skeleton (c)Kate Whitley 2010

Intern Cindy Lee Scott assists Te Papa Conservator, Robert Clendon in removing the right front leg (c)Kate Whitley 2010

The whole team works to remove the torso from the display case safely (c)Kate Whitley 2010

The conservation of Phar Lap’s skeleton did not begin in July of this year, however. Prior to the disassembly of the skeleton, some remedial work to the slumping framework supporting Phar Lap’s head and neck was conducted in his case by Robert Clendon; this was done in order to that he would “look ‘proud’ again” (Jane Keig, Media Release 2010).

In preparation for the take-down of the skeleton, there were several meetings first to discuss all of the steps necessary, not only for taking the skeleton apart, but also for how he will be crated and shipped to ensure that the skeleton arrives safely in Melbourne and returns safely to us at Te Papa in March of 2011.

The disassembly started at 7.30 in the morning on Monday, July 30th so that we would have time to get him off of display before the museum opened to the public. Under the watchful eyes of the media we took the skeleton apart into its larger pieces: first the head, than the seven cervical vertebrae, then the hind legs (to ensure that the weight distribution remained as even as possible on the remaining torso), the front legs, and finally, the torso was lifted up from its two support posts and placed onto a bed of beanbag pillows in his crate and the lot were transported up to the conservation laboratories at the Tory Street facilities.

Placing the torso carefully into its crate for transport to the conservation laboratories

Transporting the crates to the docking bay for transport to Tory Street conservation laboratories (c)Kate Whitley 2010

Unpacking the vertebrae in the conservation laboratory (c)Kate Whitley 2010

Once in the conservation lab, the long process of assessing the condition and cataloguing any damage began. This was done by myself and fellow conservation intern Elizabeth Stephens who is studying conservation at the University of Lincoln in the UK. Together we catalogued and measured every one of the 205 bones in Phar Lap’s skeleton and quite the task it was! It took us over a week!

Elizabeth Stephens works on the condition assessment of Phar Lap's vertebrae (c)Cindy Lee Scott 2010

After the condition assessment it was time for some minor conservation treatment. This consisted of the consolidation of fragile portions of the sternum and ribcage with a conservation grade acrylic adhesive, the over-painting of newly created fills, and the over-painting of spots of dark blue-black paint on the hooves, which had been applied during an earlier, though undocumented, conservation treatment.

After treatment, it was time to get Phar Lap all safely crated for shipping! The crates were made by crate-maker extraordinaire Pierre Lagace, and as you can see, they are an art form in and of themselves!

One of the many crates used to safely transport Phar Lap to Melbourne (c)Kate Whitley 2010

The Melbourne Museum exhibition will open to the public on 16 September and we hope to have photos and another blog up soon after that!

By Cindy Lee Scott | Posted in Conservation, Exhibitions, History, Mammals | Also tagged horse racing, horse skeleton, Melbourne Cup, Melbourne Museum, Phar Lap, Te Papa | Comments (2)

DNA-fingerprinting fierce lancewood

30 June 2009 – 5.01pm

Aside from ferns, my main research interest is the group of trees known as Pseudopanax, for which I collaborate with Lara Shepherd from the Allan Wilson Centre.

Blog posts on ferns

Blog posts on Pseudopanax

Lara at the Allan Wilson Centre

Pseudopanax includes the lancewoods and five-fingers. Several of the species are popular in cultivation, including fierce lancewood (Pseudopanax ferox). This species is so named for having bigger ‘teeth’ along the margins of its juvenile leaves than lancewood (Pseudopanax crassifolius).

Blog post on lancewood and its hybridisation with coastal five-finger

Paper in Molecular Phylogenetics & Evolution about the relationships of Pseudopanax

Fierce lancewood, Pseudopanax ferox. Juveniles (left) and adults (right) have very different leaves and habits. Both images by Leon Perrie, Curator. © Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

How are fierce lancewood populations related? In the wild, fierce lancewood has a very discontinuous distribution, with some populations being very isolated. We want to know how the various populations are related to one another. We are using a DNA-fingerprinting method known as “microsatellites” to determine how the various populations are related to one another. The approach is analogous to criminal forensics.

Microsatellites are highly variable regions of DNA. Each microsatellite has a number of variants which differ in length. We determine how many DNA nucleotides long the microsatellite variants are in each individual sampled. This tells us how the individuals and the populations they came from are related.

At each different kind of microsatellite, each individual has two copies, one inherited from its mother and the other from its father. The two copies in an individual can be the same or different lengths. This is a figure of one particular kind of microsatellite for two individuals. In the upper individual, the two copies are of different lengths: length 129, which is quite uncommon, and length 135 which is common and widespread. In the lower individual, the two copies are both of length 135, which is why there is only one large peak.

Our preliminary analyses suggest there are four principal genetic groups within fierce lancewood. There has probably been very little gene-flow between these groups for some time.

The four principal genetic groups detected by microsatellite DNA-fingerprinting in fierce lancewood are indicated by different colours. The small grey circles are populations that we haven’t sampled, but which are represented by specimens in the herbarium collections of Te Papa, Auckland Museum, and Landcare Research.

One of the four groups, that in the southern North Island (the brown dot), comprises a single population on one hillside!

On the other hand, another of the four groups encompasses most of the South Island (from Kaikoura southwards; green dots). The absence of strong genetic subdivision within this group suggests its populations have been more recently connected by gene-flow. This may indicate that fierce lancewood has recently been more continuously distributed in the central and southern South Island, perhaps even until the widespread clearance of lowland forests by humans.

Our preliminary analyses also suggest that the central and southern South Island populations of fierce lancewood may have survived the Last Glacial Maximum of the ice-age more or less in situ, rather than being derived from one or a few major refugia. This is consistent with the hypothesis that there was widespread survival of New Zealand’s forests during the ice-age, as we have previously inferred from genetic analyses of the forest fern Asplenium hookerianum.

Paper in Molecular Ecology about the ice-age survival of New Zealand’s vegetation

By Leon Perrie | Posted in Plants, Pseudopanax | Also tagged biogeography, DNA, DNA fingerprinting, fierce lancewood, forensics, forest, glacial, ice-age, microsatellites, New Zealand, phylogeography, population structure, Pseudopanax, Pseudopanax ferox | Comments (3)

More rare maidenhair spleenwort.

16 March 2009 – 11.18am

The rare, tetraploid maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes subsp. quadrivalens) has only recently been rediscovered in New Zealand. Several people have contacted me with possible additional sightings. As described by the Scoop website, Jack Ritchie had a maidenhair spleenwort self-sow on a rock used to construct a water feature in his nursery, Tree Guys, in Otane.

Jack took us to the local farm where the rock was sourced from, and without too much effort we found a good population: about 70 plants growing on limestone outcrops in pasture.

Tetraploid maidenhair spleenwort.

These rocks are host to several plants of tetraploid maidenhair spleenwort.

Lara Shepherd (Massey University) and I collected a few samples, and confirmed through analyses of their spores and DNA that they were the tetraploid maidenhair spleenwort rather than the common hexaploid maidenhair spleenwort.

DNA sequence data. The highlighted position is one of several DNA sites found by Lara that differ between the tetraploid (upper two samples) and octoploid (lower two samples) maidenhair spleenworts.

DNA sequence data. The highlighted position is one of several DNA sites found by Lara that differ between the tetraploid (upper two samples) and hexaploid (lower two samples) maidenhair spleenworts.

There is plenty of similar habitat in the region, so the tetraploid maidenhair spleenwort could well be much more widespread. We need to find more than 250 individuals to lift it out of the Nationally Critical conservation category, which I am hopeful we will achieve with more searching. Ideally, it will turn out to be sufficiently common that it doesn’t even need to be on the threatened list.

Thanks to Jack Ritchie and everyone else who has contacted me about the maidenhair spleenwort. I have several other promising leads to follow-up when I am next able to escape the office.

If you would like to see a tetraploid maidenhair spleenwort for yourself, then visit Jack Ritchie. He is a very knowledgeable and enthusiastic plant-person, and his tetraploid maidenhair spleenwort is the only one I know of in ‘captivity’. Jack’s Tree Guys nursery is in Otane, on the main road between Waipukurau and Hastings.

By Leon Perrie | Posted in Ferns, Field trips, Plants | Also tagged Asplenium trichomanes, Asplenium trichomanes subsp. quadrivalens, DNA, maidenhair spleenwort, rare, research | Comments (1)

Oh yes it can be dark here

19 February 2009 – 12.39pm

Colin McCahon, Northland panels, 1958

In 1958 Colin McCahon spent four months on a study tour of the United States. Although the main point of the trip was to look at how museums were run — McCahon was then working as a curator at Auckland Art Gallery — he saw an awful lot of art: everything from Old Masters to recent American painting and installation, with modern European painting and classical Asian art in between.

Coming home to New Zealand was difficult. ‘I had seen deserts and tumbleweed in fences and the Salt Lake Flats, and the Faulkner country with magnolias in bloom, cities — taller by far than kauri trees,’ McCahon later wrote. ‘I fled north in memory and painted the Northland panels.’ They were painted, he wrote, ‘on the sun deck at Titirangi all on one Sunday afternoon and corrected for weeks afterwards’.

The Northland panels are one of the stars of Toi Te Papa. Later this year they will come off display so that our conservators can work on them. The treatment will include stabilising areas of the paint and upgrading how the panels are stored. Painted on loose, unprimed canvas with typically experimental materials, the Northland panels have always presented certain challenges. Not that they’re falling to bits — far from it. It’s just that at half a century old, the Northland panels need a little bit of extra care and attention.

By williammcaloon | Posted in Art | Also tagged Colin McCahon, Northland panels, Toi Te Papa | Comments (0)

Message from Mark in the tank

29 April 2008 – 11.51am

I’m the bald guy on the Squid Cam – just out of the tank for a bit!

Thanks for you comments. It’s a real balancing act when you want to protect sea life but also want to find out about it. It is sad that the squid died but it’s up to us to use the opportunity to find out more about these amazing creatures.

We’re hoping to get enough knowledge to really learn how many there are of the colossal squid. And what the real affect of more fishing in the Ross Sea will be.

Thanks for watching.

Mark Fenwick

By chrispaulin | Posted in Colossal squid | Also tagged Colossal squid, fishing, sea life | Comments (1)

Te Papa's Blog

Tag Archives: conservation

Nukuwaiata / Inner Chetwode Island – 1936 and 2011 – In the footsteps of Edgar Stead (Part 2)

The toromiro tree: Kowhai’s remarkable cousin from Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Phar Lap’s Trip to Melbourne – A Conservation Perspective

DNA-fingerprinting fierce lancewood

More rare maidenhair spleenwort.

Oh yes it can be dark here

Message from Mark in the tank

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