Did you know that there are 27 species of native bees in New Zealand that are found nowhere else in the world? If your answer to this question was ‘no’, don’t worry – you are not alone! While most people are familiar with the ‘honey bee’ and ‘bumblebees’ (species that have been purposefully introduced to New Zealand to improve the pollination of crops), native bees often go unnoticed.

Most native bees in New Zealand are solitary and nest in the ground. All native bees consume pollen and nectar, and have similar life cycles. Female bees construct the nests in which their young are raised by digging blind-tunnels in the soil or using pre-existing tunnels in plant material. Each nest contains a cell in which the female bees place all the food that their larvae will need. They then deposit an egg and seal the cell to avoid contact with that part of the nest until the new bee has developed. Male bees on the other hand spend most their time feeding, mating and resting.

During the active flight season (mid-spring to early autumn), thousands of individuals nest alongside each other, forming large communities. By the end of autumn, adult bees die but the larvae overwinter until they emerge in mid-spring and the cycle repeats!

 

Studying native bees can be difficult as there are few ways to easily monitor them. As a result, there is much to learn about their populations, diversity and distribution throughout New Zealand. The aim of my master’s project is to investigate how soil characteristics influence the distribution of solitary-ground nesting bees in the Waikato and Northland region. In order to do this, I am analysing soil samples collected from sites with native bees and sites without native bees and comparing this to the abundance and diversity of native bees. Already, my summer sampling has revealed that the most common species of native bee within those regions are Leioproctus paahaumaa and L. imitatus.

The two most frequently asked questions I’ve encountered whilst collecting data were: “do they make honey?” and “do they sting?” No, native bees do not produce honey and will very rarely sting humans. So, why should we care about them? Native bees are key pollinators of New Zealand’s native flora. They are known to pollinate a wide range of plants including mānuka, kānuka and pohutukawa.

Also, surprisingly Leioproctus bees can open a mistletoe flower (Peraxilla tetrapetala) by biting the tip of the bud. The main pollinators of mistletoe are bellbirds and tūī, but since introduced pests have significantly reduced bird numbers, native bees have partially replaced them as pollinators (Robertson et al., 2005).

 Get involved

To find out more about native bees join this Facebook group. This page is dedicated to NZ native bees – what they look like, where they live, what they do and how we can support them.

Anna Kokeny is a MSc student in the Centre of Biodiversity and Biosecurity, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland. She is interested in the distribution of native solitary ground nesting bees in the Waikato and Northland regions. She is supervised by Jacqueline Beggs, Jamie Stavert, Anne Gaskett and David Pattermore (Plant and Food Research).

 

Posted by Samantha Lincoln @slin247

With the increasing prevalence of technology and social media, and the ability to widely disperse information, I find myself asking why I have followed a path of research and conservation. Is it with the aim of publishing in the most prestigious journals to add gold stars to my CV, or because the academic community is the most effective place to disperse knowledge? This is a question I’m yet to answer, but as my career progresses public interaction seems to be where I personally can make the greatest difference. I have always wanted to give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves and help our native species which have been under threat for so long. This blog is but one way members of Ecology Ngatahi are able to share our knowledge on a public platform; I encourage others to take a moment to remember why they do what they do and how best to truly make a positive impact in their environment.

Over the year of my Masters focussing on domestic cats (Felis catus) in urban habitats, I have found myself repeatedly compared to Gareth Morgan in a negative light. His outspoken opinions on the negative impacts of cats in Aotearoa have often isolated people from important discussions due to his cold assessment of cats, however it has also brought an important issue into public discussions. Many argue that pet cats have positive impacts due to their predation of mice and rats, and that they only prey upon common birds, and ‘my Fluffy isn’t a hunter’ – the list goes on. But there is unequivocal proof that cats do have negative impacts upon our native species, and that what cat owners see is not representative of their beloved’s total kill count. A US study found less than a quarter of kills were returned home. Rodents are still present at high levels in our urban parks despite cats. I caught 131 ship rats (Rattus rattus) and 7 Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) over just five nights (1255 corrected trap nights) at eight urban Auckland bush fragments, at sites with plenty of cat activity.

Ecology can be a tangle, which is why single species control for pest management can lack luster compared to more comprehensive programmes. Large scale projects with generous community input like Cape to City are a great way to inspire and educate the public; putting academic findings to practice while encouraging future generations of scientists. We need to continue open discourse regarding pest management of all pest species, treating ecosystems as integrated systems which won’t be fixed by single species control. As scientists, it is our responsibility to ensure relevant information is made available to the public in a readily consumable format to dispel misinformation and encourage active conservation.

Despite some of our pest species being adorable, we must act to save our natives.

 

Sam Lincoln is an MSc student in the Centre for Biodiversity & Biosecurity, School of Biological Sciences, University of  Auckland. She is trying to disentangle interactions between domestic cats and rats in urban environments. She is supervised by Margaret Stanley, John Innes and Al Glen.

 

 

 

Posted by Robert Vennell @RobertVennell

From the very beginning, camera trap images have fascinated us.  In the 1890’s George Shiras III – “Grandfather Flash” – developed the first true camera-traps using trip wires and animal lures. When an animal triggered the wire it activated a magnesium flash gun that detonated in a blinding explosion of light that sent animals scattering in all directions. The images he captured were the first night-time wildlife photos ever created and revealed eerie snapshots of a hidden world.

In the past few decades camera traps have undergone a revolution as a scientific monitoring tool and advances in technology along with a huge reduction in price have led to an explosion in camera trap research. And yet camera traps remain unique as a monitoring tool as they not only collect valuable data, but they produce fascinating images that retain their power to amaze and inspire.

In this way, camera traps represent a unique blending of science and art. They allow us to investigate the natural world, but also package and present it in an engaging way. Raw data has never looked so delicious and interesting; arriving pre-wrapped in shiny packaging, immediately ready for consumption.

“Raw data has never looked so delicious and interesting”

As such, camera-traps offer us a monumental opportunity for science communication. Anyone can immediately appreciate and understand the data – allowing us to bridge the gap between ‘experts’ and the public, and open up a dialogue about a range of different issues.

However, with such a unique opportunity it is important that we don’t get carried away with the art and forget about the science. It’s very easy to collect camera trap data – the hard part is knowing what to do with the data. What do the images of animals we collect actually mean? Do they simply provide evidence that a species exists in an area, or can we use them to ask deeper questions about whether or not our conservation actions are working?

“What do the images of animals we collect actually mean?”

This brings us to my research topic this year. I’m going to be studying feral pigs and the damage they cause to native forests by rooting up the undergrowth. I’ll be using camera-traps to monitor the abundance of feral pig populations – and will undoubtedly collect a vast amount of fascinating pictures. But I want those pictures to be as meaningful as possible.

In New Zealand conservation, the overwhelming majority of monitoring funding goes towards results-based monitoring – a “how many pigs did we kill?” mentality that doesn’t answer the more fundamental question of “did killing all those pigs actually achieve our goals?”.

What I hope to do is create a damage function that links the number of pigs on the cameras with the damage they cause to the environment. This should help managers around the country set meaningful targets for pig control that will help protect and restore native forests.

That’s the scientific message that I really want to communicate with my research, and luckily for me I’m going to be armed with arsenal of tasty visual treats to help me do it. I’ll be sure to share them with you as I go.

Robert Vennell is an MSc student in the Centre of Biodiversity and Biosecurity, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland. He is supervised by Margaret Stanley, Mark Mitchell (Auckland Council), Cheryl Krull (AUT) and Al Glen (Landcare Research). He also writes about the history, meaning and significance of New Zealand’s native tree species at www.meaningoftrees.com

Posted by Josie Galbraith @Josie_Anya

Something all scientists share is an inherent understanding that science is a worthy pursuit. That knowledge, like pie, is worth seeking. We are prepared to read paper after paper – countless paragraphs of text – for the betterment of our understanding. But even amongst ourselves, we usually draw the line at reading literature outside our fields of interest. And fair call – ain’t nobody got time for that. Papers outside our broad disciplines may as well be written by aliens. Alien subject matter, alien concepts, alien terminology. Crossing the disciplinary event-horizon doesn’t exactly make for easy digestion or light bedtime reading.

We all want sweet juicy visual treats.  

Not paragraphs.

What we all want, what we really really want, is for someone to hand us delicious bite-sized science in shiny wrappers. Sweet juicy visual treats, like graphical abstracts, infographics and animations (check out this sweet as bird feeding animation – yeah you got me… it’s mine). Data visualization and visual storytelling aren’t new concepts, but in this digital age they have become more important than ever. Increasingly, journals across the spectrum are recommending or even requiring visual summaries of research. Visual representations of research are many more times effective at engagement than legions of characters lined up on a page (there’s a graphic of that). Do not underestimate the power of the drawn lines.

What’s more, this kind of science is also perfect to share with all manner of non-sciencey folks. Science communication is, after all, a hugely important part of science and part of our responsibility as scientists (scidev.net editorial, Brownell et al. 2013 ). Not all of us are comfortable giving interviews via conventional channels (TV, radio, articles). Furthermore, mainstream media have a tendency to cover only those articles that are sexy, sensational, or published in the top journals. But, with the age of social media, opportunities for communicating science to the world in graphical ways have skyrocketed and we can do it ourselves. We don’t have to wait to be asked. Make the most of it. Turn your fancy words into shiny pictures, because pictures are great. Great for society and great for our own science.

Don’t wait to be asked. 

Turn your science into a shiny picture today!

It is a vastly useful academic exercise to distill your research down into a single picture or a 60-sec animation. What is it that really matters about your study? What are the vital pieces? And these days we need to do more distilling. While opportunities to communicate science are increasing, attention spans are shrinking. Sharing scientific findings graphically is the perfect answer.

A final comment: don’t let artistic skill or lack thereof stand in your way. Graphics software is pretty awesome these days (your institution may already have a license for Adobe Illustrator, or there are many free apps too). Failing that there are people out there to help you with the research make-over you’re looking for (shout out to deSciphered and maybe future me).

Josie Galbraith is a PhD student in the Centre of Biodiversity and Biosecurity, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland. She is supervised by Margaret Stanley, Jacqueline Beggs and Daryl Jones (Griffith University, Australia). She is also known to dabble in the dark arts – painting, illustration, graphic design, and animation.

Science in wrappers image © Josie Galbraith.  This image includes vectors designed by zhaolifang and larvarmsg Vecteezy.com.

Posted by: Margaret Stanley @mc_stanley1 and Cheryl Krull @CherylRKrull

Too often pest control is focussed on the number of pests killed, rather than the actual benefits of removing the pests.

Most monitoring during pest management focusses on ‘results’ monitoring, which measures how many pests are killed during the control operation. However, the often forgotten, but more important type of monitoring is ‘outcome’ monitoring. This type of monitoring measures the true success of an operation by focussing on why the pests were killed in the first place. For example, outcome monitoring for a control operation targeting conservation damage by an herbivorous pest (e.g. brushtail possum) might be the ‘foliar browse index’ – which can indicate whether there is less damage to trees as a result of removing possums. The danger of only doing ‘results’ monitoring is that you’ll never know if you are achieving the biodiversity benefits you think you are. This costs money and the confidence of stakeholders.

The tide is starting to turn, with more investment in outcome monitoring. The key challenge is to link damage and damage thresholds to pest control operations. For example, some neat NZ research has shown that once you get above 4 rats per ha in podocarp forest, you start losing tree weta. Rat control operations can therefore be triggered at ‘damage thresholds,’ rather than undertaking regular control, saving money on pest control, and reducing the use of toxins.

This was our challenge posed by Auckland Council: we know feral pigs are causing damage to forest ecosystems, but how much feral pig control is enough? Feral pigs in dense temperate rainforests are notoriously difficult to count, and control is expensive.

In our new paper, we report on how we used a 3-year pig control programme (ground hunting) to understand how control reduces pig densities, but most importantly, how pig control affects the rates of ground disturbance. We (the royal ‘we’ means Cheryl – as part of her PhD research) measured ground disturbance (rooting) by pigs throughout the Waitakere Ranges (Auckland, NZ) for the entirety of the hunting programme.

The control operation reduced the pig population by a third, but it reduced ground disturbance by more than half. When we simulated hunting regimes at different intervals, only the 3-monthly hunting interval achieved a constant reduction in ground disturbance. BUT, sending in hunting teams every 3 months is incredibly expensive and over time, starts to yield diminishing returns on that investment. Is a constant reduction in ground disturbance what we want? If managers switched to triggering control at unacceptable levels of ground disturbance (a disturbance threshold), would we still have worthwhile biodiversity outcomes?

So more appropriate questions for managers to ask rather than “how many pigs did we kill?” are “how much disturbance is too much?” and “when should we trigger feral pig control based on ecosystem damage?” One of the biggest issues for pest managers is the enormous cost of outcome monitoring. Getting clever about how we monitor and making sure we know what the monitoring means, is one of the challenges facing managers and scientists.

The next step in this story is about to happen. Masters student Robert Vennell is creating a density-impact function for feral pigs in forest. He’s trying to get to grips with how ground disturbance relates to the number of pigs detected on camera traps. Could this be a cheaper way to trigger control based on outcomes? Watch this space for his research story.

RESEARCH PAPER: Krull CR, Stanley MC, Burns BR, Etherington TR, Choquenot D. 2016. Reducing Wildlife Damage with Cost-Effective Management Programmes. PLoS One DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0146765

Dr Margaret Stanley is a Senior Lecturer in Ecology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland and is the programme director of the Masters in Biosecurity and Conservation. Her interests in terrestrial community ecology are diverse, but can be grouped into three main research strands: urban ecology; invasion ecology; and plant-animal interactions.

 

Dr Cheryl Krull is a former member of the Ecology Ngātahi lab group, completing her PhD on feral pigs and then as a postdoctoral fellow in the group. She is now a lecturer in the Institute of Applied Ecology New Zealand at AUT and is continuing her research into feral pig impacts and control, along with other conservation projects.

Posted by Keely Paler @keely_paler

The first things that people say about Fiordland are that it’s a really beautiful place but the sandflies are the size of elephants. My recent trip to Fiordland proved they weren’t wrong. The sheer number of sandflies means that headnets are now my favourite fashion accessory. However the stunning-ness of the location more than made up for it.

In November, I went down to Te Anau, Fiordland to complete the first part of my master’s fieldwork. This adventure began with hastily rearranging flights to capture the best weather window. Because of New Zealand’s highly changeable weather this is an important part of ecological fieldwork in remote locations. Despite this planning, we arrived to an unexpected layer of snow, but these surprises are part of the fun of working in the field.

 

In order to get to our alpine study site in Takahe valley (in the Murchison Mountains of Fiordland), I had my first experience flying in a helicopter (a lot scarier than I imagined). This site is a particularly awesome place to conduct research because it’s where the ‘extinct’ takahe was rediscovered in 1948. Since this time it has been classed as a ‘special area’, accessible only to scientists and pest-control operators. This relatively undisturbed environment means it is an ideal place to study the effects of climate change on New Zealand’s unique alpine biodiversity. My master’s research will examine how insects respond to climate change using open-top-chambers to experimentally induce localised temperature increases). Insects are captured using pitfall traps, which will be collected during a second trip in March. Despite the sandflies, I can’t wait to go back.

Keely Paler is an MSc student in the Centre of Biodiversity and Biosecurity, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland. She is supervised by Darren Ward, Rich Leschen and Adrian Monks (Landcare Research) examining climate change and alpine insects.