On the morning of Thursday 16 of October, Curator Vertebrates Alan Tennyson came in and asked Curator Fishes Andrew Stewart if he knew anything about the fish lying out in the carpark up at the Tory Street building. Worried that it might be a collection item, they went out andRead more
Over the last few months, three examples of a most enigmatic and unusual oarfish washed ashore in Tasmania, at Aromoana, and Birdlings Flat, causing an immediate spike in interest: Was this a sign that a major earthquake was imminent? Are we in for a bumper herring harvest… both?! That is what Andrew was asked by reporters from the Christchurch Press and The Guardian. Here, curators Andrew Stewart and Thom Linley break down the science of the oarfish.Read more
The iNaturalist City Nature Challenge is an annual event where cities around the world compete to record the most observations and species, and have the greatest number of participants over a four-day period. Science Researcher Lara Shepherd, Invertebrate Curator Kerry Walton, and Vertebrate Curator Andrew Stewart discuss some of the events held in Wellington during this year’s Challenge, where they were able to share their expertise to help people explore nature.Read more
This Psychrolutes microporos, also known as “Mr Blobby,” the blobfish, is the iconic ambassador for The Deep Sea and personifies everything we air-breathers seem to find weird about it. The image, one of the internet’s first viral memes, has been claimed by a myriad of organisations, usually without the actual photographerRead more
Te Papa fish experts Andrew Stewart and Thom Linley, and mollusc expert Kerry Walton, are part of a team that discovered well over 100 new animal species in the depths of the Bounty Trough, east of the South Island. The expedition was led by Ocean Census, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), and Te Papa. We caught up with Andrew, Thom, and Kerry to hear why this expedition was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.Read more
We all need to ‘scale up’ in our careers, so which tools have the Fish Team at Te Papa invented over the years to a) solve the unique challenges of their jobs and b) dazzle international visitors like a show of bioluminescence? Fish Curator Andrew Stewart gave summer intern ShonaRead more
Assistant Curator Natural History Andrew Stewart describes a recent specimen processed by the Fishes team – one of the more striking deep-water predators and relative to the barracouta (a.k.a. the Fisherman’s curse), a large oilfish called Ruvettus pretiosus. Read more
Recently our Fish Team processed some bycatch specimens that had been sent to us by MPI Scientific Observers. In one box were not one, but four specimens of a rare species of a frogmouth fish. Not only that, the biggest one was a world record.Read more
Around the world, gobies are a major component of the benthic fish fauna of coastal tropical and temperate seas and estuaries – except around New Zealand. Here, triplefins (family Tripterygiidae) have evolved 30 species which have radiated to fill almost every ecological niche more usually occupied by gobies elsewhere. ItRead more
A recent discovery has highlighted, yet again, just how poorly we know what lives around our coasts – some within sight of our major cities – especially among rocky reefs. Te Papa’s fish expert Andrew Stewart introduces us to the polkadot triplefin.Read more
Some of the fishes in our collection were collected over 100 years ago. Fish Collection Manager Andrew Stewart explains how these ‘time capsules of data’ are central in current research.Read more
Sunfishes (family Molidae) are large, distinctive, oceanic fishes found worldwide. Scientists generally agree there are two species of sunfish – the oceanic sunfish (Mola mola) and the bump-headed or short sunfish (Mola ramsayi). However, recent DNA analyses of sunfish samples collected and sequenced overseas has indicated the presence of aRead more
