New Zealand

Favorite Photos of 2019

A Rothschild giraffe takes a stroll in its outside enclosure on an unusually warm December day at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

A Rothschild giraffe takes a stroll in its outside enclosure on an unusually warm December day at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

2019 was a momentous year for me with my studies abroad and the launch of Natural Curios. I lived on the other side of the planet for five months in Brisbane, Australia, which spurred me to start writing this blog about the natural world’s curious nature, which was on full display during my travels around Australia and New Zealand. After a year of exploring why Australia’s koalas and monotremes are some of nature’s most curious creatures, how climate change is threatening both Queensland’s flying foxes and Grand Teton National Park’s glaciers and how a giant fossil sea monster blasted out of the outback with dynamite ended up at Harvard, I wanted to dedicate an article to highlighting some of my favorite photographs from this past year. I was lucky enough to explore the world’s largest coral reef and some of the oldest rainforests in the world. I climbed on top of volcanoes and encountered wild parrots in the snowy Southern Alps. From Australia to New Zealand to Chicago to Los Angeles, and some locations in between, I was able to cover a lot of ground over Natural Curios’s inaugural year. Thankfully, I always had a camera with me ready to capture whatever sparked my imagination. Enjoy my favorite photographs from 2019 and stay tuned for new articles in the next few days! Also, don’t forget to check out Natural Curios’s full photography gallery here!

Landscape

Below are some of my favorite landscape pictures from the other side of the world. These pictures comprise both iconic locations, like the Great Barrier Reef and the Sydney Harbor, and more tucked away places, like a quiet, secluded spot in the Brisbane Botanical Garden and Australia’s easternmost point at Byron Bay. My week-long sojourn to New Zealand (bottom row) provided some of the most breathtaking landscapes I have ever seen from the mist-shrouded waterfalls of Milford Sound to the black-sand beaches and soaring volcanic cliffs of Piha Beach to the public parks populated by New Zealand’s most populous residents—sheep.

Animals

These animal pictures are among my favorite from the past year and include animals from both Australia and New Zealand, as well as zoos and parks across the United States. Going to Australia, I was incredibly excited to see world-famous residents like cuddly koalas, gargantuan saltwater crocodiles (aka “Salties”) and ripped kangaroos. The creature that most caught my imagination while I was Down Under was the blue-headed, killer cassowary that disperses seeds in Australia’s primeval rainforests at the top of the continent. Back in the States, I captured such striking creatures as Indonesia’s green peafowl and Lowland gorillas. One resident of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo particularly caught my attention. The Guam kingfisher is extinct on its native island due to invasive snakes and only staves off oblivion in a few zoos around the world, including the Lincoln Park Zoo. There are less than 100 individuals in the whole world. I also captured animals in the wild, like Southern California’s sea lions and New Zealand’s alpine kea in the Southern Alps.

Natural History

Natural history is the study that encompasses all of my favorite disciplines, including paleontology, zoology, botany, geology and environmental studies that, together, help us understand how plants and animals have interacted with the natural world over the last 4 billion years. Natural history museums are my favorite places to visit because they provide insights into the natural world through the display of a diverse assortment of interesting and bizarre specimens, like a juvenile great white shark pickled in alcohol, a dinosaur fossil with mummified skin, or a macabre wall decorated with the ancient skulls of hundreds of dire wolves exhumed from Southern California’s tar pits. Natural history displays also help us picture the distant past by assembling skeletons, like a giant predatory mosasaur or the giant Diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever. Sometimes they even give us ideas of what these primeval behemoths would look like with flesh, skin, fur or scales on their fossilized bones, like the Australian Museum did with its Diprotodon model. Only at natural history museums can you take in the scale of a pygmy blue whale skeleton and feel the explosive power palpable in the split second before an inland taipan, the most venomous snake on earth, strikes a rat. The tuatara picture is the only picture of something that is still alive, but even it offers a look deep into the earth’s past as it represents the last vestige of a whole order of reptiles (bottom row).

Cityscape, Architecture and Miscellaneous

From Sydney’s bustling fish market to Brisbane’s skyline glistening in the late afternoon sun, there were a few of my favorite pictures this year that I could not fit in the three categories above. Among them were several glimpses of the splendid gothic architecture of Australia’s Saint Mary and Saint Patrick cathedrals in Sydney and Melbourne, respectively, and the more subdued St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Queenstown, New Zealand. Queenstown’s soaring peaks also provided an intriguing backdrop for ornate grave stones. The one benefit of a mostly rainy week in Auckland were the wonderful rainbows that would spring up throughout Auckland’s bustling port, giving the cranes and barges a magical quality. And I could not resist putting a picture of one of Steve Irwin’s iconic saltwater crocodiles moving back into its enclosure after a show at the Australia Zoo.

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The Tremendous Tuatara

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The archaic reptile can live for over a century, survive refrigeration and is equipped with a third eye. So please don’t confuse it with a lizard.

The ancient, enigmatic tuatara, shrouded in darkness. Picture taken at the Kiwi Birdlife Park in Queenstown, New Zealand.

The ancient, enigmatic tuatara, shrouded in darkness. Picture taken at the Kiwi Birdlife Park in Queenstown, New Zealand.

Tuataras are not lizards. In fact, they are the last survivors of a completely different order of reptiles that stretches back some 240 million years to when the dinosaurs were emerging. Tuataras, as the last members of the Rhynchocephalia Order, are incredibly ancient --- the very definition of a living fossil. Every animal closely related to them is entombed in stone.

The Rhynchocephalia reptiles experienced their heyday some 200 million years ago. They were essentially the ecological precursors to lizards, occupying many roles that lizards have now. After their 140 million year run, most of them bowed out, along with the dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous Period. All except for the tuataras, which have carried the Rhynchocephalia torch for the last 60 million years. They are the ultimate survivors.

Two species of tuatara are left today, Sphenodon punctatus and the rare Sphenodon guntheri. The word tuatara is Maori for ‘spikes’ or 'peaks’ thanks to the spines that run along its back. On the surface, tuataras are somewhat mundane in appearance, resembling a medium-sized, brownish-green lizard that reaches between 12 and 30 inches long, making them New Zealand’s largest reptiles. But look a little closer and its prehistoric roots emerge.

A female Tuatara at the Auckland Zoo.

A female Tuatara at the Auckland Zoo.

Being a vestige from the dinosaur age, tuataras are unlike any modern reptile. Tuataras sport a mouthful of saw-like blades. They have two rows of teeth on the upper jaw and one row on the lower jaw, an unusual arrangement for reptiles. But what distinguishes a  tuatara’s teeth is that they are really just jagged extensions of the jaw bone, not actual separated teeth. Because of this, if a tuatara breaks or wears down a section of teeth, it has lost those teeth for the rest of its life because its teeth do not grow back like other reptiles.

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New Zealand’s Other Living Relic

The size of a hamster, the giant weta is the world’s heaviest insect. The huge insect happily eats carrots and is too heavy to jump! Many people would find an insect this large repulsing and its name reflects that. It comes from the Maori word for “god of ugly things.” Like its predator, the tuatara, the giant weta is a living fossil, closely resembling relatives from 190 million years ago. Unfortunately the giant weta population has dropped drastically since the arrival of rodents slightly bigger than itself. Today, the giant weta has been completely wiped off mainland New Zealand and only survives on small offshore islands that are sheltered from rats. Thanks to a breeding program at the Auckland Zoo, the monster insect may be making a comeback.

Tuataras have incredibly slow metabolisms and are capable of surviving close to freezing temperatures and holding their breath for an hour. They hibernate during the winter and are capable of surviving months of refrigeration. Where the average reptile’s body temperature hovers around 68 degrees, tuataras have their internal thermometer set between 41 and 52 degrees. This decelerates their metabolism and also causes them to mature gradually, growing until they turn about 30 years old. While not quite having the longevity of a tortoise, tuataras can live to over a hundred years old, especially if their teeth hold up.

The strangest feature of a tuatara is that it possesses a third eye on the top of its head. Known as a parietal eye and complete with retina, lens, cornea and nerve endings, it is not used for sight. Some burrowing lizards and sharks also possess a parietal eye, which is capable of detecting light. Shortly after hatching, this primitive extra eye is covered with scales, but has stuck around because it has some function. It could possibly be used by the reptiles to absorb ultraviolet rays and set their circadian clocks.

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New Zealand’s Lizards

Although tuatara are not lizards, New Zealand has more than 110 species of geckos and skinks, most of which are found nowhere else on earth. New Zealand’s geckos, in particular, are unusual because they give birth to live young. The only other place with geckos that do this is New Caledonia. Pictured here is an endangered rough gecko from the Auckland Zoo.

The tuatara quietly lived out its existence on the remote islands of New Zealand for millions of years. Adults are nocturnal, searching the damp forest floor for insects and young birds among the ferns, themselves relics from the Jurassic Period. Tuatara hatchlings are active during the day to avoid run-ins with potentially cannibalistic adults at night. Life, as they knew it in their undisturbed primeval forests, was good.

But then arrived humans, bringing rats with them. Tuataras, along with many of New Zealand’s endemic birds, were ill-equipped to deal with a predator unlike anything they had ever seen before. Rats gorged themselves on tuatara young as well as the eggs, ultimately eliminating the ancient reptile from all of mainland New Zealand. It seemed unlikely that a living relic that had persevered through a mass extinction caused by an asteroid 60 million years ago would quietly succumb to a hoard of rodents, but that is, in fact, what happened.

Between approximately 1800 and 2005, tuataras bided their time on small offshore islands that offered refuge from the invasive pests. Tuataras have been protected since 1895, but the first successful attempt to reintroduce them to the mainland was not until 2005 when a few were released in a sanctuary. In 2008, a tuatara nest was found, the first successful breeding attempt by a tuatara on mainland New Zealand in two centuries, offering a glimmer of hope that the strange scaly beast may survive yet again. Today there are around 55,000 tuatara dispersed on several islands between the North and South Islands.

Tuataras are undoubtedly a strange, alien creature from the distant past. Their perseverance has been incredible, outliving the rest of their kind in New Zealand’s ancient forests. Living fossils like tuataras are like time capsules: they have witnessed the disappearance of dinosaurs on New Zealand, scurried underfoot as towering moas travelled through the forest and barely survived the arrival of mammals. They act as a window into prehistoric times and will hopefully live on for millions of years to continue to tell the tale of New Zealand’s ancient past.

Windows to the past: peering into the eyes of an ancient relic is thankfully still possible today thanks to arduous conservation projects to protect the Tuatara and New Zealand’s other endemic species from rats and stoats. This picture was taken at …

Windows to the past: peering into the eyes of an ancient relic is thankfully still possible today thanks to arduous conservation projects to protect the Tuatara and New Zealand’s other endemic species from rats and stoats. This picture was taken at the Auckland Zoo.

All photographs and art by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/creatura-blog/2017/12/the-tuatara/

https://www.wired.com/2013/12/the-creature-feature-10-fun-facts-about-the-tuatara-or-just-the-tuatara-of-us/

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/reptiles-and-frogs/tuatara/

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/reptiles-and-frogs/lizards/geckos/

http://mentalfloss.com/article/64804/10-intense-facts-about-giant-weta

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Remembering New Zealand’s larger-than-life birds, taken from us way too soon.

One of the first thing I came across when visiting New Zealand a few weeks ago were towering sculptures of New Zealand’s two most famous birds, nestled in a small green area between the international and domestic terminals at the Auckland Airport. One was a giant sculpture of a kiwi. Flanking the kiwi sculpture was a bronze moa, too small to do the actual bird justice, which is what they probably would have wanted. Both of the sculptures symbolize the incredible lifeforms that call (or called) New Zealand home, but the moa represents more than just New Zealand. It represents the end of an era when our earth was obsessed with making things bigger during the last few ice ages. It represents the extremes of what is possible for nature. And most poignantly, the demise of the moa represents man’s dominance over nature.

The Auckland Airport’s moa!

The Auckland Airport’s moa!

So who were the moas? Moas were large flightless birds, ranging from the size of a turkey to the tallest bird ever that would have been eye level with the rim of a basketball hoop. The nine species of moas belong to the order Dinornthiformes, and were originally placed in the ratite group along with the modern giant birds of today like the ostrich and cassowary. But recent studies have found that moas are more closely related to the tinamous birds of South America, which are much smaller and can fly.

Sizing Up Moas: This sketch compares the height of the average human man (5’9” in the US) and the shortest and tallest moas, the little bush moa and the South Island giant moa (which weighed up to 550 pounds), respectively. The South Island giant mo…

Sizing Up Moas: This sketch compares the height of the average human man (5’9” in the US) and the shortest and tallest moas, the little bush moa and the South Island giant moa (which weighed up to 550 pounds), respectively. The South Island giant moa was the tallest species of bird ever, and would have been a dominant basketball player if it had arms or wings.

New Zealand is known for its flightless birds, but moas took that trait to the extreme. They are the only group of birds to completely lose their wing bones. This shrouds their arrival on New Zealand in mystery (they obviously did not fly there without wings) and makes it likely that their ancestors were on the landmass before it split from the rest of Gondwana 85 million years ago or arrived shortly thereafter, and then proceeded to lose their wings.

Without wings, moas used their long legs to get around. The earliest arrivals to New Zealand, the Maori people who arrived around 850 years ago, say that moas were swift and agile runners and would kick to defend themselves. Their temperament seemed to be tamer, however, than modern-day cassowaries who disembowel someone every so often with a swift kick to the stomach. Although intimidating due to their massive size, the moas were peaceful vegetarians, eating grass, leaves and berries from the treetops accessible with their long necks.

South Island giant moas strut their stuff in front of New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

South Island giant moas strut their stuff in front of New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

The giant eggs of moas had surprisingly thin shells, some only a millimeter thick. Only around 30 intact moa eggs survive to do this day.

The giant eggs of moas had surprisingly thin shells, some only a millimeter thick. Only around 30 intact moa eggs survive to do this day.

When looking at such a large animal, one cannot help but wonder what kind of sound it made (we all think about T. rex’s roar right?). Thanks to the fossilization of some moa bones from their throats, moas probably sounded something like a giant swan or crane vocalizing through a megaphone, with deep, booming calls that could travel for miles. No one would call moas a James Dean because they effectively lived slow and died old. Unlike many other birds, who mature in a year, moas took around 10 years according to rings in their bones. As you may expect, moa eggs were giant, capable of being almost ten inches long and seven inches wide.

New Zealand proved to be the perfect place for the moa thanks to a lack of mammalian predators and other large herbivores. The only thing the moa had to worry about was death from above thanks to a complimentary large bird of prey, the Haast eagle that had talons the size of tiger claws. Even so, moas thrived on New Zealand for millions of years. Fossils of moas have been found dating back some 2.4 million years and would have lasted another few million years if not for the arrival of man to far flung New Zealand.

The extinction of the moa on New Zealand was caused by the arrival of humans who over-hunted the birds to extinction. According to a 2014 study taking DNA from 281 individual moa specimens, representing four moa species, the bird’s population numbers were stable for the 4,000 years preceding their extinction. The largest species, the South Island giant moa, was even seeing an increase in its population until humans arrived. There were no signs in the moa’s genetic history, like low genetic diversity, that show an animal declining towards extinction. This rapid “disappearance” of the moa, approximately one hundred years after humans arrived is the smoking gun for its extinction.

A man and his moa: Paleontologist Richard Owen, best remembered for coining the term “dinosaur” and helping start the British Natural History Museum, was sent a leg bone fragment from a strange New Zealand animal in 1839. The bone’s light weight per…

A man and his moa: Paleontologist Richard Owen, best remembered for coining the term “dinosaur” and helping start the British Natural History Museum, was sent a leg bone fragment from a strange New Zealand animal in 1839. The bone’s light weight perplexed Owen, who suspected it to come from a mammal because of its large size. After four years, Owen concluded that it was in fact from a giant bird and named it Dinornis. After skepticism from much of the scientific community, Owen was ultimately proved right when vast amounts of moa bones were found throughout New Zealand. Today his bust sits beside a moa skeleton cast at Auckland’s War Memorial Museum.

The moa is not the only large animal to be wiped out by humans over the last few thousand years. In fact, it effectively bookends this trend of megafaunal (large animal) extinction that began around 13,000 years ago. Species like mammoths, sabertooth cats, giant marsupials in Australia and ground sloths all disappeared over the last 10,000 years as humans began to spread around the world. In most cases humans were not the only cause. Several ice age species were also dwindling due to climate change as the earth warmed, and human hunting helped wipe out a struggling species. The trend of human impacts on megafaunal extinctions are painfully clear on islands as species began to go extinct from island to island upon the arrival of humans. The extinction of the moa 600 years ago ends this series of megafaunal extinction that saw some of the biggest terrestrial animals since the dinosaurs go extinct.

Moa Skulls: Moas were all part of the Order Dinornithiformes but split into two different families: the Dinornithidae family and the Emeidae family. The moas that Owen named Dinoris are part of the first family and include two species: the North Isl…

Moa Skulls: Moas were all part of the Order Dinornithiformes but split into two different families: the Dinornithidae family and the Emeidae family. The moas that Owen named Dinoris are part of the first family and include two species: the North Island giant moa and the South Island giant moa (second from left). The other seven smaller species (including the other three skulls pictured here) are from the Emeidae family and are from both the North and South Islands. This sketch is based off of skulls at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

But the moa lives on in the imagination of New Zealanders and people from around the world. The giant bird would have been a sight to behold in real life, making the ostrich look mundane by comparison. But perhaps its early demise saved it from some of the indignities faced by its living relatives. If it had survived to see European settlers in New Zealand, it just as likely would have gone extinct from hunting. Many of New Zealand’s other birds are not doing too well today, from the kiwi to the kakapo, thanks to invasive mammals and habitat loss. If the moa had somehow survived two waves of human hunting, how much of its habitat would be left today? In addition to hunting animals, humans also find other ways to exploit large animals for economic gain. With larger eggs and greater size, the moa would have probably replaced the ostrich in zoos and farms.

Mummified moa: This painting is based off of a mummified foot found inside a cave at Mount Owen. The preservation of this foot, which dates back some 3,300 years, is so great that some muscle and sinews are still intact along with the creature’s sca…

Mummified moa: This painting is based off of a mummified foot found inside a cave at Mount Owen. The preservation of this foot, which dates back some 3,300 years, is so great that some muscle and sinews are still intact along with the creature’s scaly skin. This foot once belonged to the upland moa, which was the last species to go extinct around 1500. Among the smallest of moas, the upland moa preferred to live in the cold, alpine environments of the South Island.

The moa is gone forever, which is an existential bummer. Moas are often mentioned in the de-extinction debate as a species that could be revived since their extinction fits the date range for relatively intact genetic material. This material has been left behind in large amounts of fossils and mummified remains. But that is a discussion several decades away, if ever. For now we should just take solace in remembering New Zealand’s giant moas, the last true giants to roam New Zealand’s primeval forests.

Never forget the moa! Picture taken at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Never forget the moa! Picture taken at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

All photographs and art by Jack Tamisiea.

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Sources:

The Auckland War Memorial Museum moa displays

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/why-did-new-zealands-moas-go-extinct

http://extinct-animals-facts.com/Extinct-Animals-List/Extinct-Moa-Bird-Facts.shtml

http://nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/upland-moa