They’ve been here 300 million years. They grow on rock, or in deserts, or underwater, or on dead animals—and they can survive ...

Last week, scientists and kaitiaki set to work to necropsy the rarest whale ever discovered—a spade-toothed beaked whale that washed up at the mouth of the Taieri River, south of Dunedin.

Your perch: a giant tōtara in the central North Island. Your view: thousands of hectares of podocarp forest, chainsaws chewing its edge. Your mission: to stage the world’s first treetop protest. Your ...

Bats need the forest, but the forest also needs bats: they are thought to play crucial roles as efficient, prolific pollinators of forest species. David Pattemore, an ecologist and pollination ...

There isn’t a catch limit on the lucrative whitebait fishery, which threatens to extinguish a cherished tradition and a small family of fish in one sweep of the net. If nothing changes, two whitebait ...

Whether providing shade for a summer picnic, standing sentinel on a crumbling cliff or splashing Christmas crimson along garden edge, street or shoreline, the pohutukawa is one of the trees New ...

No one knew that Kaikōura was home to the world’s only alpine-dwelling seabird until an amateur ornithologist following a rumour discovered its burrows high in the mountains. As the bizarre attributes ...

One of the world’s smallest nations is transforming its economy from subsistence to sustainability. Will Niue’s brave new plan work? Each year between August and October, humpbacks rest in the calm ...

The Mokohinau stag beetle is one of the world’s most endangered species, occupying less than an acre of scrub on a rocky tower in the middle of the ocean. Its habitat is so precarious that Auckland ...

Legend has it that the first person to cross the Southern Alps from Hokitika to the Rakaia was a woman travelling alone. The pass she discovered became an important route for war parties and trade. In ...

Plantations of exotic timber trees, especially pines, are looked on with disdain by many as alien monocultures, an unpleasant accommodation necessary to protect precious indigenous forests from the ...

I can’t fully recall how the affair started, it was so long ago. I was in Pat Bergquist’s invertebrate zoology class, at the University of Auckland, in 1975. She was talking about sponges. Bergquist ...