Aotearoa New Zealand is an unusual place. Its millions of years of isolation allowed life to evolve in a unique environment. As a result, significant numbers of our fungi, plant and animal ...
Ranking species according to their risk of extinction is an important tool in conservation management. The Department of Conservation (DOC) spends almost 15% of its total budget on species ...
Throughout human existence we have relied on the oceans – for food, as a waste dump, for recreation, for economic opportunities and so on. However, it’s not only our activities in the marine ...
Human beings have an impact on river ecosystems. The relationship living organisms have with each other and with their environment is extremely complex. Impacts on a species or a non-living ...
The traditional concept of kaitiakitanga is part of a complex, social, cultural, economic and spiritual system that has been established through long association of iwi and hapū with land and ...
Estuaries are extremely valuable. They: are nurseries – breeding grounds for fish and birds maintain the health of coastal fisheries and waters are a buffer between land and sea – protecting the ...
New Zealand is home to a wide variety of water fowl. Water fowl is the common name for the Anatidae, the family of birds that includes ducks, geese and swans. Most of the Anatidae in New Zealand ...
An ecosystem consists of all of the organisms living within an area and the interactions between them and the physical environment. All ecosystems, whether they are marine, freshwater or located ...
The takahē (Porphyrio hochstetteri) is an endangered species and classed as nationally vulnerable under the New Zealand Threat Classification System. The takahē is a flightless bird found only in ...
People like to live near estuaries. In pre-European times, estuaries were favourite places for Māori to gather – particularly to harvest and enjoy kaimoana. Today, there are major settlements ...
Historical artefacts like moa bones can be dated using a technique that measures the activity of the radioisotope carbon-14 still present in the sample. By comparing this with a modern standard ...
The takahē is a large, flightless bird – the largest living rail bird in the world. Rails are a family of ground-living birds and live on every continent except Antarctica. Takahē are endemic to ...
Takahē (Porphyrio hochstetteri) once lived throughout the South Island. Their original habitats were the bushy edges of lowland swamps and rivers. Today’s remnant takahē population lives in the ...
Skinks and geckos are the only 2 native families of lizard found in New Zealand (note that tuatara are not lizards). They are vertebrates and belong to the class Reptilia. All our native skink ...
Mussels are filter feeders. They draw in seawater and filter out phytoplankton and sediments, cleaning the water as they go. This 25-second video is a before and after display of murky seawater ...
An inquiry approach is a method often used in science education. The question bank provides an initial list of questions about pollination and places where their answers can be found. The article ...
1080 is the brand name for sodium fluoroacetate – a manufactured poison. It is the sodium salt of a naturally occurring plant toxin called fluoroacetate. Plants use this toxin to defend ...
This animated video shows the movement of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust. Starting 600 million years ago, watch continents form and break apart as the plates move. Pangaea the ...
These interactive resources are all about takahē as well as supporting year 12 biology assessment AS91158.
A habitat is the area where an organism or group of organisms live and breed. One habitat will be distinct from another due to its particular environmental conditions. However, habitats are not ...
Takahē are one of New Zealand’s conservation success stories. Their conservation status has moved from extinct to nationally vulnerable in the 70 years since they were rediscovered in the ...
Mussels are bivalve molluscs. New Zealand has 22 species of mussel including the blue mussel (kuku), little black mussel (hauea) and the ribbed mussel (pukanikani). Depending on the species ...
In pre-human times, almost all of New Zealand was covered in forest, with the exception of high mountain areas. Māori settlers began to clear forest, and by the time the first Europeans arrived ...
Mana whenua of the Ihumātao Tucked in between Manukau Harbour and Auckland International Airport is the small papakāinga Ihumātao. The papakāinga is Auckland’s oldest settlement – the remains of ...
