Coasts

The main breeding population of New Zealand sea lions at the Auckland Islands has halved in size since the late-1990s; NIWA scientists are working with the government and experts from around New Zealand and overseas to understand why.

A sea hare is a type of opisthobranch or sea slug in the phylum Mollusca, with soft bodies, a reduced internal shell and two tall rhinophores coming out of their heads that resemble the ears of a hare.

While Tangaroa might be considered its flagship, NIWA’s extensive range of maritime work could not be completed without the support vessels Kaharoa and Ikatere.

A NIWA scientist with an international reputation as an outstanding leader in marine ecological field experiments was last night awarded the prestigious New Zealand Marine Sciences Society (NZMSS) Award.

Marine scientists are proving they know that it takes good bait to catch a big audience.

NIWA has just deployed six acoustic moorings to eavesdrop on mysterious noise makers in the Cook Strait, New Zealand.

Dr. Michelle Kelly of NIWA and Dr. Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University, have just published a paper describing an amazing sponge which was found on a NIWA cruise to the Colville Ridge, north-east of New Zealand.

Anyone can participate, and all you need is access to the sea, a smartphone or a camera and computer.

Like other members of the family Asteriidae, Allostichaster is fissiparous. This is defined as the ability to reproduce asexually by fission, e.g. by splitting in half.

The Cidaroida is an order of very spiky and robust regular sea urchins, which can resemble something like a sputnik satellite or an underwater mine to the uninitiated.

Geodia ewok Sim-Smith & Kelly, 2015 is an astrophorid sponge from the family Geodiidae. It was described, along with 16 other new species, in a recent publication by Sim-Smith & Kelly (2015) which increased the number of described New Zealand Geodiidae fauna from four to 22!

What is the difference between our previously featured squat lobsters and this week’s critter? This one you can actually swim with if you wanted! All the others live at the dark depths of the New Zealand ocean, but Munida gregaria (Fabricius, 1793) or the gregarious squat lobster is commonly found in shallow coastal waters along the eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island.