Catherine Woulfe

Dec 13, 2023 | nzgeo.com | Catherine Woulfe

Acquiesce. It’s the name of an anaesthetic used to knock out tank-reared kingfish so that the people farming these apex predators for food can handle them. A disquieting word. Margaret Atwood would love it. But it’s not science fiction: it’s happening now. We’re farming kingies—and we’re farming pāua, hāpuku and whitebait, too. It’s uncanny to grow big, dynamic kingfish in tanks on land. To strip eggs from kōkupu in tanks up north, and fly them to Bluff to conceive whitebait.

Dec 13, 2023 | nzgeo.com | Catherine Woulfe

Before we asked him to write about Mangahouanga Stream—a spot heaving with fossils, including the odd dinosaur—Hayden Donnell had had only arms-length experience with things prehistoric. Dino books, when he was a kid. A trip to the Natural History Museum in New York. And a brush with the T-Rex presiding over the atrium of Auckland Museum (his kids brought home Omicron as a souvenir). So it was jarring to hear there was a stream in northern Hawke’s Bay where fossils just stuck up out of the water.

Dec 13, 2023 | nzgeo.com | Catherine Woulfe

Dunedin Wildlife Hospital spends November absolutely chocka with hoiho chicks. Arriving to document the babies, and the volunteer team nursing them through their first vulnerable weeks, Connie Buchanan gagged. The babies in their incubators were pretty cute. Not so the stench. “You know those little packets of dried seaweed that kids have as snacks? It smells like that a hundred times over.

Dec 13, 2023 | nzgeo.com | Catherine Woulfe

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Dec 13, 2023 | nzgeo.com | Catherine Woulfe

Geo News We’re getting better at joining the infection dots What you’re looking at is the story of an infection. Specifically, how the bacterium Citrobacter rodentium spread through hundreds of mice at the University of Auckland’s bioluminescent superbugs lab.