Last year, they were hit with a deadly virus. The year before that, starvation. What will this breeding season bring for the thousands of fur seals hauled up on our coasts? Along the rocky Ōhau coast, ...

On page 54, Nic Low writes about a beach settlement at Moeraki. The sea is eating it, graves and taonga and all. Sheep and rabbits are chipping away with sharp hooves and scraping paws. Nic spirals ...

In 2019, scientists asked the public to catch and freeze mosquitoes, then post them to Te Papa. Over three years almost 900 tiny packages turned up. About a third of the insects weren’t mosquitoes at ...

Almost all sponges live in the sea, “and they’re the kind that people know about”, as University of Otago palaeontologist Daphne Lee says. But a team led by her German collaborator Uwe Kaulfuss has ...

The bone belonged to a songbird, but it didn’t belong to any existing New Zealand songbird, alive or dead, and so Elizabeth Steell was stumped. Steell, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge ...

Scientists who spent nine years birdwatching in Wellington ecosanctuary Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne report that birds visit the flowers of kōtukutuku, our native tree fuchsia, 16.4 times an hour. That ...

Fifty-nine Christmases ago, 10-year-old Andrew Penniket unwrapped a snorkel, mask and flippers. It was a transformative gift. Now, in a memoir, Penniket recounts his adventure-filled career of ...

All around you, animals are building, burrowing or stealing dwellings for themselves and their families. For others, home is a state of mind. What do wasps, book publishing and bureaucracy have in ...

In 2022, an extraordinary set of images surfaced at auction. Taken in Christchurch around a hundred years ago, they show a small group of young gay men—tops off and grinning in sand dunes; reclining ...

I had been eyeing the end of 2025 with trepidation—thousands of subscriptions were set to expire. In the last magazine I asked for help. The message: we still need subscription income to power our ...

New Zealand Geographic has engaged the Planetary Accounting Network to calculate the impact of our journalism activities and products, both print and digital. New Zealand Geographic has engaged the ...

Horse mussels are massive. Given a chance, the shellfish can grow to almost half a metre long. University of Auckland marine scientist Jenny Hillman says that until the 1990s, these huge shellfish ...