Boiling water and the stench of sulphur hardly seem a combination conducive to life, yet some bacteria thrive in such hostile environments. Biologists are beginning to think that the first life forms ...

Lampreys have done without bones—even jaws—for 360 million years, making do instead with a mouthful of rasps designed for shredding. But those teeth are no match for a new and invisible enemy. Are ...

New Zealand’s 11 wilderness areas offer adventure, solitude and a glimpse of the world as it was. But what does the future hold for what one tramper termed our “hunting grounds for the imagination”?

This insect was snapped by New Zea­land Geographic Trust’s inaugural young gun Bryce McQuillan, while holidaying in Port Waikato over Christmas. McQuil­lan thought it was a weta, although the presence ...

Here we are—a nation of parents, grandparents and children all in the same boat, together at home. He waka eke noa. Every day of the lock-down we will post a story or video and set of activities that ...

Over the last 30 years shopping has gone from necessity to major recreation, and the venues in which we spend out money and time have changes also. Increasingly we shop in malls, such as the vast and ...

Zip, pip, chuck, goes the call of Aotearoa’s smallest bird. It may turn out to be one of the earliest forms of language. On the flanks of Harbour Cone, on the Otago Peninsula, riflemen nest in the ...

In March of this year, a special courier arrived in Wellington from France carrying a rather unimpos­ing stuffed lizard for dis­play at the National Museum. This specimen ­described by one ...

In 1834, the Englishman William Swainson was at the height of his scientific career. Aged 45, loaded with honours from the scientific academies and institutions of Paris, Quebec, South Africa, ...

The iconic puriri moth is the elephant of New Zealand’s 30 species of swift moth. Its life is brief. The adult moth lives for only 48 hours after as long as five years as a larva. And with no ...

The proposed Kermadecs Ocean Sanctuary stretches over 620,000 square kilometres of sea, pocked with small rocky islands and riddled with underwater volcanoes and deep trenches. It supports life not ...

People and livestock gobble so much fish that the seas soon won’t keep up. Is the answer to grow fish on land? After decades of research, scientists are cracking the secrets to commercially ...